How do we turn off automatic smart quotes/special character substitution?

Question

In Mathematica 8, whenever I enter "hello" into a cell of style "text", the quote marks are automatically converted to special characters:

\[OpenCurlyDoubleQuote]hello\[CloseCurlyDoubleQuote]

This automatic substitution does not happen in a cell of style "input" (good!).

Because I use Mathematica notebooks as a front-end to LaTeX, for me this substitution is a disaster, no matter where it occurs.

What is the preferred idiom for turning-off this smart-quote feature (and all similar automatic character substitution features) for all cells in a Notebook?

The ASCII characters that I type, are precisely the characters that I want in the notebook!

The Mathematica documentation is unhelpful ... or possibly I am not looking in the correct place.

Answer 1

In the Option Inspector (CtrlShift O) look for AutoQuoteCharacters and set this on empty list. I presume you could set the same in the stylefile too.

Answer 2

 Options[EvaluationNotebook[], CommonDefaultFormatTypes]

gives the default formatting:

You can use Options Inspector to change the format type for Text from its default value TextForm to StandardForm:

To change the setting programmatically for the evaluation notebook, you can use:

SetOptions[EvaluationNotebook[], CommonDefaultFormatTypes -> {"Text" -> StandardForm}]

Alternatively,

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, CommonDefaultFormatTypes -> {"Text" -> StandardForm}]

changes the setting for all new notebooks.

EDIT: You might want to explore related settings in the Options Inspector:

EDIT 2: I like Sjoerd's answer better. Here is the way to change this option setting programmatically:

SetOptions[EvaluationNotebook[], "AutoQuoteCharacters" -> {}]

or

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, "AutoQuoteCharacters" -> {}]