Finale Forum

I've been careless; my current (large) document has a large number of "straight" ASCII quote marks floating around (in plain Text and in Text Expressions); I'd like to fix them now, and make them "curly" quotes.

But Finale does not appear to have a text "find" function. I found JW Navigate, which is able to search on text, but... when I ask JW Navigate for a quote mark, Finale crashes. I've tried several different ways of specifying the quote mark to JW Nav (double them, backslashes, etc), but no luck.

Would there be another way to search for text strings?

I'm running 2014.5 on 32bit Windows.

thanks,
Garry

Edit menu > Text Search & Replace...

GarryW wrote:… Finale does not appear to have a text "find" function …

1) I do not have Finale 2014 anymore, but:
In my own copy of Finale v26 I have
Edit menu > Text Search & Replace…

The trick is that you should not search for " alone, but rather for " in combination with a space character:
- replace { "} with { “},
- replace {" } with {” }


2) Have you looked at FinaleScript?
Finale comes with some ready made scripts, including a script that might interest you:
Plug-ins menu > FinaleScript > FinaleScript Palette > Simple Scripts > Smart quotes to straight quotes Text Search & Replace

Peter, I was able to use TS&R simply by entering a single straight quote in the first field, and the curly one in the second.

Seems like a quote at the beginning would have neither a space before nor, probably, one after.

Peter: re: including a leading/trailing blank in the search: you're brilliant! I "should have" thought of that. That got almost all of them. Just a few exceptions (for example, at the very beginning or end of a text string), but I cleaned the exceptions up easily.

Still... it would be really nice to have a plain old control-F "find" in Finale. And the Mac equivalent. I would happily use such a feature to find my way around in a number of situations. Makemusic, please do it for consistency, if nothing else.

Miker: I totally wasn't clear about needing to differentiate the straight quotes into two different curly quotes.

Thank you all.

If only Finale had regular expressions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression).