I've got a document using English-style single quotation marks: '...' It's easy enough to replace them with US-style double quotations marks using Find/Replace in MS-Word. If you're still with me, here's my question: Can anyone think of a situation where a quotation, person speaking, is not preceded or followed by a space. I'm not counting quotation marks at the beginning of a paragraph.

Not counting quotation marks that start a paragraph, I would expect each quotation mark to be preceded or followed by a space character, yes.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I was reading last night and came across a bump in the plan. An abbreviation of them and hello which is 'em and 'ello. So, it'll take a little more attention. Maybe find a list of common abbreviated words.

If we are talking about typographical single quotes, wouldn't your examples be a right quote (= apostrophe) preceded by a space? For example: ’ello. These would be different from a quoted portion of text: ‘Here is my quote.’

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I agree, they should be considered apostrophes, but I don't think Word knows the difference. If I could somehow get Word to know the difference between a closed-quote, open-quote, and apostrophe that would make editing so much easier. As it is now, I have to eye-ball most of the issues I've found. For example: I always check quotation marks that follow or precede a long dash or ellipses. Many times I've got to force the mark to hash the correct direction. Word can't tell sometimes if it's a close or open quotation. It all depends on the source text and the writing style.

I realise this is an old thread but I just found it by googling my problem.

Some time ago our writers' group had a debate about Quotation marks as used with speech. Should text be enclosed with single-quotes;
‘I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that,’ sang Meat Loaf.

Or should we use double-quotes;
“I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that,” sang Meat Loaf.

Some people preferred the former whilst I had been in the habit of using the latter. But, in the interest of uniformity, all the short stories in our forthcoming book were either submitted using, or were converted to, single-quotes. Now I find I have some documents–even whole books–with single-quotes where I’d prefer double. I needed to find some way to reformat long documents automatically.
I considered using the Replace function in MS Word 2003 to replace all instances of ‘ with “ but realised that apostrophes (which, as far as Word is concerned, are identical to single-quotes) would be changed to double-quotes too. This would have produced;
“I”d do anything for love but I won”t do that,” sang Meat Loaf.

Obviously, that’s no good. I searched the good ol’ interweb, convinced that some Bright Spark would have sorted this out with a cheeky wee utility. I found nothing.

So I did a bit of brainstorming and realised that speech quotes and apostrophes are positioned in unique ways with regard to the text that surrounds them. For instance, a ” (double-right quote) is never followed by a letter whereas an apostrophe often is. I won’t belabour the rules I derived since, if you examine the five lines below you should be able to follow my reasoning.

To replace ‘ with “ and ’ with ”, do the following Replace procedures;

Replace…

^p’ with ^p”
.’ with .”
,’ with ,”
?’ with ?”
!’ with !”

Don’t worry that ‘ and ’ look different as do “ and ”. MS Word will automatically decide which is required and choose the correct one for you.

This seemed to work fine, but then I found an exception that lets some text get screwed up;
“Hello, Jim,” he said. ‘How’s life?”

The single-quote before the word How is unchanged. I could use Replace… space/single-quote with space/double-quote.
But then this;
‘Hello, Jim,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you ‘round here before.’
Becomes this’
‘Hello, Jim,’ he said. “Haven’t seen you “round here before.’

If I could do the replace only after aspace and before an upper-case letter I’m sure it would work. But I can’t see how Word 2003 would do that.

Now my head is spinning and I’m off for a lie-down in a dark room.

I doubt if Replace is up to all this complexity. Maybe I need to investigate Just Basic.