EDIT: My problem has been fixed or, more precisely, worked around, thanks to help in the comments below. Never figured out what exactly the issue was as it wasn't a problem with my Emacs configuration but with my Emacs installation (which I had originally done via Homebrew).
I am using Emacs 25.0.5 on OS X 10.10.5. For some reason, Emacs displays ‘ ’ and “ ” only as ' ' and " ", respectively. The behavior persists in typopunct-mode (from the Typopunct package), although things like en- and em-dashes display correctly as distinct Unicode characters. The behavior also persists if I use a variable width typeface I am certain has glyphs for curly quotes.
buffer-display-table: emacs.stackexchange.com/a/9627/2287 You'll need to check the character with something likeC-u C-x =to see what it actually is before you make a decision about changing the visual appearance. Some libraries modify thebuffer-display-table, so your testing should be done in afundamentalbuffer with no major or minor-modes active -- e.g., start with Emacs -Q and set up thebuffer-display-tableto your liking. I set several as variables.fundamental-modebuffer after having started with Emacs -Q and the question looks perfect in Emacs -- just like in the question above. So, try first with Emacs -Q and you may be pleasantly surprised about what you see. I just performed the same test with Emacs -Q on two versions of OSX -- i.e., El Capitan 10.11.5 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 -- same results in both versions of OSX. I'm using the GUI Emacs, not the terminal."is now“, but only for that scratch buffer. I don't actually know elisp. How would I go about setting such a glyph substitution globally in all buffers in my init file?buffer-display-tableis designed to be buffer-local. The general approach is to narrow things down by identifying what modes are active in the buffer that is suffering from the undesired behavior. TypingM-x describe-modewill pop-up a buffer that shows the name of the major mode and all active minor modes. In general, disabling the minor modes (commenting stuff out) is the first step and then see if the problem disappears. If the problem doesn't disappear, then the issue may be with the major mode itself. You may need to restart Emacs several times as you disable things.Applicationsfolder, and the problem has been fixed and everything seems to be working. I'll stick to these builds rather than installing via Homebrew in the future. Learned quite a bit from this. Thanks again for your help and patience!