Typography: How do I create smart (or curly) quotes using a Mac keyboard?

There’s actually a system-wide smart quotes feature built into recent versions of OS X (at least as far back as 10.5 Leopard). It isn’t supported by all applications, but it may be just the thing you’re looking for if your favorite apps do support it. Start by going to System Preferences → Language & Text. Next click the Text tab across the top of the window and make sure the options next to Smart Quotes are configured appropriately for your region / locale (chances are they’re correct already). Finally, in the app where you’re editing text, make sure to enable the Smart Quotes option under Edit → Substitutions (I’m using TextEdit for example here, but this same menu item will be present in any app that supports OS X’s system-wide text substitution feature). Now, one problem is this setting isn’t sticky. In most apps, every time you open a new document you’ll have to re-activate the substitutions you want. I’m not thrilled about it, since I feel like this should really Just Work™, but I do have a solution for you. Open up Terminal and run this command: defaults write -g WebAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled -bool true Note that after you do this you may have to restart some of your applications before the new default will apply. Since, as I mentioned up front, many apps don’t support this, I don’t think it’s quite the silver bullet Apple probably intended it to be. Though this feature can only get better over time as it gains wider adoption, memorizing the keystrokes for the individual characters (as provided in other answers here) is still important if you want or need to use curly quotes everywhere. P.S. The following Terminal commands will enable system-wide smart dashes and text replacements, in case you’re interested in those, too: defaults write -g WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool true defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool true

Note that it varies depending on the keyboard layout. On a Swiss German qwertz layout the keys are: “ is ⌥2 (" is ⇧2, so it’s easy to remember) ” is ⌥⇧2 ‘ is ⌥ ¨ (the ! key next to return) ’ is ⌥⇧¨