Suzanne:

You have hit upon a sore point that has caused me many sleepless nights. The problem is that HyperCard was never really intended to be used as a word processor. Text fields such as the one you're reading now automatically wrap words onto the next line, but that's about it. Hypercard simply doesn't view quotation marks (and various other types of punctuation) as being part of the word and so they don't "stick".

There are some good reasons for this, and future versions of HyperCard may offer some kind of "word processing field" as another program called "Plus" does now, but in the meantime it's highly annoying.

Long, long ago I did come up with a partial solution (see Vol 3 John 15 and then follow the conversation from there if you like). We now have a special font with special keys that produce "sticky punctuation". If you hold down the option key and hit "y" you will produce a quotation mark that actually sticks to the word it follows. Option 3 and 4 produce sticky parenthesis. In practice, most Archipelagoans don't bother to make their punctuation stick, so I do it for them as part of my quiet editorial routine.

For more information about the fabulous voice font, see Vol 5 John 13.