Windows and Word users have always driven me crazy when they complain about crazy characters in their posts or pages...and the cause is almost always smart quotes or dashes. With the release of OSX Mavericks, we too now have the misfortune of smart quotes. Smart quotes are those little angled quotes that point to your content. Like:

“Smart double quotes.”          "Dumb double quotes."
‘Smart single quotes’           'Dumb single quotes'

If you are pasting things back and forth between people and someone has crazy encoding settings, or isn't using UTF-8, those characters can get all crazy, and not show up properly. Especially when pasting them straight into a database.

So, lets disable them!

To do so in OSX Mavericks:

1. Open System Preferences from Applications or Launchpad or wherever.
2. Go to Keyboard
3. Go to the Text tab
4. Uncheck Use smart quotes and dashes.

If you are using TextEdit, you will also need to:

1. Open TextEdit
2. In the top menu, go to TextEdit > Preferences
3. Uncheck both Smart quotes and Smart dashes

Enjoy!