Preserve typography (quote marks) when converting to Markdown?

When I import web pages into DevonThink and tell it to convert them to Markdown documents (no matter whether the clutter-free option is turned on or off), there are some automatic typography replacements happening that I’d really prefer not to. The one that annoys me most is when a text contains typographically correct quote marks and DevonThink turns them into their awful straight typewriter-style counterparts.

This also doesn’t change when I turn the Editing > Smart quotes preference checkbox on or off.

However, when copying and pasting text from a web page into a Markdown document, this kind of typography stays intact.

Am I missing a hidden (or not so hidden) switch somewhere? Is this intended behaviour, and if so, why?

Do you clip the web pages as Markdown or clip them using another format and then convert them to Markdown?

The issue occurs in each constellation that I’ve tried thus far. My current approach is to clip web pages as a bookmark first and then convert it to Markdown inside DevonThink (followed by manual typography fixes, so that part of my workflow is obviously absurd).

Are you saying that you have a path in which the problem does not occur? If so, would you mind sharing it with me?

I can confirm that behaviour (try Introduction to JXA | JavaScript for Automation (JXA)), which has some typographic quotes at the beginning of the second paragraph). When I capture that as MD from Firefox with DT’s add-on, I get an MD file with straight quotes. So “simple” is turned into “simple”:

√ ~ > od -db
“simple”
0000000     32994   29596   28009   27760   57957   40320      10
          342 200 234 163 151 155 160 154 145 342 200 235 012
0000015
√ ~ > od -db
"simple"
0000000     29474   28009   27760    8805      10
          042 163 151 155 160 154 145 042 012
0000011

So someone decides to go from Unicode quotes to ASCII ones. That shouldn’t happen, of course.

As an aside, this forum software here in turn replaces all the quote signs with the “nice” ones. Which is why I edited my original post here two or three times. :slight_smile:

Single backticks could help: “nice” quotes, and escaped ones "like so"

I’m still new to this forum—what’s the way to go in order to ideally get the developers’ attention, and ultimately a fix for this issue? (I understand that we agree this is indeed a bug that should be fixed?)

We’re aware of the issue.

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Note: Getting the developers’ attention is a first step. It is not a guarantee of a fix, depending on the particular issue. Or perhaps it is an issue that is lower priority and will be fixed at a later time. Just be aware.

Fixed.