Extra space after apostrophe

I had a similar issue.  However my language was set to ENGLISH.

If you highlight you document (CTRL A), choose Times New Roman, or a font your computer has installed, it will go away.

EDIT AFTER POSTING:

I had not realized there were multiple pages concerning this question. After posting this request, I read the post above about setting the font. I am absolutely certain that I had done that, since I was looking at Times New Roman 11-point, just as I wanted, but something seems to have gone haywire at some point. (Re-edit: as it turns out, I probably had not set the font; it was just coincidence that I wanted TimesNewRoman and the PDF text actually appeared in that font in Word, which is unusual.)

I highlighted the entire text and selected Times New Roman, and voilà, my random punctuation problem has disappeared. Thanks to the person who posted that.

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Has anyone actually figured this out?

I have used Word for many years. Suddenly today, in one particular file, this nonsense has started.

The language is set to EN(US) (my default language setting is EN(CA)). I have set the language multiple times for the entire document (highlight by CTRL-A, select language). At all points in the doc, the language shown in the status bar is EN(US).

With both quotation marks (") and apostrophes ('), Word is inserting double spaces before the opening one and after the closing one. The spaces can't be deleted; the punctuation mark and two spaces are treated as a single unit when I try to delete the spaces.

Example:

I said “I don’t want this”.

looks like

I said   “I don’  t want this”  .

The text in the file was copied from a French-language PDF (not converted, just copied using the Foxit copy function), so that I can translate it using the typeover function. I do this all the time, and have never had such idiocy result.

I've tried using Autocorrect and Autoformat to find a solution, and there is none.

This is not a function of French punctuation. In French, a space is inserted before a colon (:) and before a quotation mark (?), and sometimes, if an author is feeling particularly pretentious, before a semi-colon (;). If this had to do with French, I would be getting French quotation marks with one space after the opening and one space before the closing mark, like so:

« not this »

That is not what's happening. I have no idea what language might want two spaces after/before a standard quotation mark or apostrophe. None, I think.

Anybody?? Thanks.

If you send me a copy of the document, referencing this thread in the covering email message, I will investigate the issue.

Hi Doug and thanks for the offer. I can't really send the document, unfortunately, because although the thing itself is in the public domain, my copy of it is subject to a non-disclosure agreement. Sounds silly, I know, but I hesitate to step out of line in that regard.

I was so eager to try the font fix when I spotted it after posting my message that I did that without checking what font might be showing when the problem occurred. But I have copied the text from the PDF again into a new Word doc, where the problem does still occur, and I see that the font shown for the entire document - i.e. with no settings done by me - is TimesNewRoman (and lang = EN(CA)) ... and then when the apostrophe/quotation marks do their thing, that bit shows as Calibri (and lang = EN(US)).

So in my case there doesn't seem to be any character-language setting intervening, and it's still a mystery why this happens (and why it switches languages to EN(US) when I type an apostrophe or quotation mark). I should also note that the apostrophe/quotation marks that get inserted are higher above the line of text than a superscript character is (but more or less normal size). If I set the entire doc to Calibri, the problem also disappears. So I suspect there is some weird intervening font there, I just can't see what it is.

The clever people who figured out the font problem solved mine, though, in any case, whatever magic is involved.