* Question marks appearing in text

[StevieA]

I hope that someone can tell me why when I put text in quotes it puts ? next to " and the words.
Please see attached screen dump.

[Jane]

It looks like you might have "smart" quotes, did you copy text in from Word?

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG Stevie.

Presumably, you did not enter those quotes from your keyboard?
So where did you copy them from?

Is that screenshot of a Notes box or a Report screen?

[RS3100]

Coincidentally I found the same in a record note yesterday. It was information that I had copied and pasted from a website some time ago, but I'm pretty sure that it did not include the question marks when displayed in FH6. I've only noticed it since moving to FH7.

I found that deleting the "?" symbols in the note didn't remove them. As soon as I tabbed out of or closed the note window they reappeared. I fixed it by highlighting and cutting the note from the note window, then pasting it back using the "Paste Unformatted Text" option.

[StevieA]

The question marks were not entered via the keyboard, they simply appeared as per RS3100 response.
It is a notes box but I can't remember if I copied this text from word, as sometimes I do.
If you correct it, it simply reappears.
I'll try RS3100's solution.
Many thanks all!

[PeterR]

I've just checked my GEDCOM file, and it contains a few examples of “smart” quotes, some from as far back as 2009. They've always displayed correctly (with no extraneous “?”) in FH6 and in FH7.

[LornaCraig]

I began to notice several cases of both double and single quotes being displayed with question marks beside them. All were in text which had been entered in V6 and had displayed correctly in V6. I assume they were all cases where I had copied and pasted from other documents or from something I had written myself in Word.

I have now corrected them all by using Edit> Find and Replace, doing four runs - one for each of the opening and closing quotes for both double and single quotes. There were several hundred in total.

[BillH]

Lorna,

I have been following along and am a little confused. So you changed single quote (') and double quote (") to something? What did you change them to?

Thanks,
Bill

[LornaCraig]

Bill,
The quotes which were displaying oddly (with a question mark after them) were, I think, ones which had come from Word documents or similar, and are known as Smart Quotes. Here's what Wikipedia says:

Quotation marks are written as a pair of opening and closing marks in either of two styles: single (‘...’) or double (“...”). Opening and closing quotation marks may be identical in form (called neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, or "dumb" quotation marks), or may be distinctly left-handed and right-handed (typographic or, colloquially, curly quotation marks); see quotation mark glyphs for details. Typographic quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text. Because typewriter and computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much of typed writing has neutral quotation marks. Some computer software has the feature often called "smart quotes" which can, sometimes imperfectly, convert neutral quotation marks to typographic ones.

FH7 evidently doesn't display these smart quotes correctly in notes, in even though FH6 did. So in the Search for box I pasted a 'smart' quote (single or double, right or left curling) which I copied from a Word document, and in the Replace with box I used the keyboard to enter a 'dumb' quote (single or double, as required).

[BillH]

Lorna,

I see. How did you get examples of a smart quotes and double quotes. I couldn't see how to get them using the keyboard, so I tried to produce smart double quotes in word, but I when I typed something like "test", the double quotes were both the same... pointing in the same direction (right to left - looked like ending quotes).

I was just saving this info in case I ever upgrade to FH 7.

Thanks,
Bill

[LornaCraig]

It might depend on which font you are using in Word. Some fonts make a clearer distinction than others. In Times New Roman, for example, the start and end quotes are clearly different. In Calibri they both slope the same way, though even in Calibri on close inspection they are a different shape. There are probably some fonts where they look identical. These examples are from Word:

fonts.JPG (10.1 KiB) Viewed 6687 times

[PeterR]

Smart quotes are just UTF-8 characters like any others and can easily be typed using alt-0147 and alt-0148 (or alt-0145 and alt-0146 for single quotes). Whether typed by hand or imported from a Word document or a web page, I find they are always displayed correctly in FH7, as well as they were formerly in FH6.

2021-01-22_125122.jpg (1.83 KiB) Viewed 6655 times

The above image is from an FH7 Record Detail Report for a Source record with a Note downloaded from the internet. Note the lack of spurious question marks!

[LornaCraig]

Well I don't know why we are seeing different results, but all I can say is that I have just repeated the exercise and am still seeing the incorrect display. I copied from a Word document and then, to re-create what would have happened with the notes which came from V6, I pasted into a note field in V7 as unformatted text. Then when the note window is subsequently floated, the question marks appear, and remain thereafter.

sample.JPG (16.42 KiB) Viewed 6648 times

A further odditiy is that if more unformatted text is then pasted into the floating note window and the window is then closed again, the number of question marks increases every time! See below

[tatewise]

I have repeated your process with the latest MS Word and FH v7.0 beta using “test” but do NOT get any ? marks.
So I wonder what is causing the problem.
Do you have a later version of FH v7 that has perhaps introduced a bug?

[LornaCraig]

I am using FH 7.0.1.1. I don't know whether the question marks showed in 7.0.0 (or the beta) because I only started to look for them when I saw this topic. But clearly I am not alone because the problem was reported by StevieA and also RS3100.

[BillH]

It might depend on which font you are using in Word. Some fonts make a clearer distinction than others. In Times New Roman, for example, the start and end quotes are clearly different. In Calibri they both slope the same way, though even in Calibri on close inspection they are a different shape. There are probably some fonts where they look identical.

Lorna,

That was the problem for me. I was using Calibri. I switched to Times New Roman and was able to tell the difference and get examples of all four symbols.

Thanks!
Bill

[PeterR]

I was on FH 7.0.0.10 so I've now updated (taking only a few minutes) to FH 7.0.1.2 (evidently the current version). The smart quotes are still being displayed correctly with no extraneous “?” on screen or in a report.

[tatewise]

What do the question marks look like in the GEDCOM?
Are they freestanding normal ANSI question marks?
Do they or the quotes have any rich text formatting around them?

[NickWalker]

As a matter of interest, which version of MS Office (if any) do you have installed on your PC Lorna?

[LornaCraig]

Mike:
Here is the mini (one-person) gedcom which contains the example I posted previously, where the number of question marks increased each time I pasted an extra line into the note window and closed then reopened the window.

Test Project.ged

(973 Bytes) Downloaded 72 times

Nick: It's Office 16. But some of the notes which came from V6 would have been created in earlier versions of Word.

[RS3100]

The issue I experienced was with text that I copied from a website and pasted into a note in FH6. I know it displayed correctly in FH6, but I subsequently noticed that in FH7 it was displayed both in the Propert Box and separate note window with a question mark immediately after a pair of leading and closing quotation marks (") and also immediately after several hyphens, i.e. (-?) that were also contai9ned in the original, as copied, website text. I did notice that the hyphens as displayed were longer than the standard hyphens that could be entered in the text box using the hyphen key on my keyboard (to the right of the ")0" key).

I attempted to delete the question marks by editing the note window, and whiulst that initially appeared successful, as soon as I clicked on the OK button, or clicked out of the note field in the Property Box, they reappeared within the note. As mentioned above, I eventually fixed the note by cutting and pasting it into notepad, removing the question marks, associated quotation marks and hyphens, then retyping the quotation marks and hyphens, and copying the edited text back into FH7 as unformatted text.

I have since searched my project for any other occurrences, but only that one note was affected. It had never been edited or opened in Word or any other word processor, just copied and pasted from a browser window.

I have just located the same note in an old gedcom file, and copied it into a new note in FH7. It is displaying correctly. The only difference is that I was running either the original release build of FH7 or v7.0.1.1 when I experienced the problem, but I am now running 7.0.1.2 which CP sent me a link to a few days ago in response to a bug report for a different issue.

[PeterR]

I loaded Lorna's Test Project.ged in FH, deleted the question marks, and they did not reappear.
I also looked at the GEDCOM file in PSPad's Hex editor and the smart quotes and question marks all had the expected coding.

[RS3100]

This is the text of the note retrieved from my old gedcom file. The start and end quotation marks are clearly different, and you can see the "long" hyphens.

This text now displays correctly for me when pasted into a note in 7.0.1.2 so perhaps it is a fixed bug that was present in an earlier build?

Note.JPG (29.41 KiB) Viewed 6582 times

[NickWalker]

The richtext control in windows is in a dll and there have been various different versions over many many years. I havent been able to find a really clear timeline for this but I know that there have been versions that have been shipped with Office over the years and Windows, each one adding new features. For example if you use FH7 or AS in Windows 7 you can't drag table columns to resize them (at least without Office installed). So I wondered if the dll that FH is using on Lorna's PC (and others seeing the ?) might be different to the one on Peter's, mine and others where it's working fine. I've been half-expecting an issue to crop up related to this.

I have Office 365 which updates continuously. The dll in question I believe is c:\windows\system32\msftedit.dll and mine is dated 13th Jan 2021 and is: Rich Text Edit Control v8.5 (v10.0.19041.746).

[RS3100]

Nick, mine is Rich Text edit Control, v7.5 (v6.3.9600.18818) dated 8th September 2017 and Word v2002 (semi-annual enterprise channel) although as I said, Word has been nowhere near my problem note.

So I don't think that .dll has changed recently, but I can no longer recreate the issue with spurious question marks. What has changed is the version of FH7 I am now using.