How to replace a shortcut for another shortcut? (character, NOT program action)

Hello everybody,

I have a tricky - at least for me - problem I don't find a solution for. As English isn't my mother language and it is quite confusing to describe what I want, I hopefully succeed in explaining: I want to use french quotation marks in Pages and "WriteRoom" (a simple text program) - « and ». At the moment, I have to press Alt+Q and Alt-Shift+Q to get these characters. As I often accidentally press CMD+Q while writing (which closes the program), I want to change this shortcut to ALT+<> and ALT+SHIFT+<>. If possible, even better to the normal SHIFT+2" which automatically sets the right quotation marks at the beginning and end of the quote. Is there any way to do so? I searched the net and didn't found a real solution - in OSX, you can only create shortcuts to program actions and in Pages and WriteRoom, I didn't succeed in finding a setting which helps me. (I tried the automatic correction - changing "blah blah" to »blah blah« which only corrects the second quotation mark.) I also cannot just change the language to French (if this would solve the problem) as I have to use the « » characters exactely the other way around as in France. I also didn't find any program which I can tell: use this shortcut to "activate" the other, more difficult shortcut. I can't go the route to first write the whole text and then tell Pages: replace " with «/», as it won't be able to tell the difference between the first " and the second " ...

Again: Sorry for the confusing description, but it's really difficult to describe for me in English ... Any help would be appreciated, no matter if the way really is an extra shortcut or an automatic replacement oder whatever. Thanks A MILLION in advance!!!

 

Hi macnfab,

thanks for your answer - it's not what I asked, but I understand that it is confusing to read. Anyway, I figured out a solution which is okay - I found a True Type Font which automatically uses the french »« brackets instead of the " ". This should work. However, thanks again for your help and reading my confusing mess, really appreciated!