Hi Jamie,
It would be worth noting it as a known issue. I don't want to say it is impossible to solve it but I remember trying really hard to solve it without success. The problem as I recall is differentiating between things that need to be encoded and things that will be broken if you do encode them.
One could solve this specific example, the solution of changing to ft and ins works but one could also have solved it in source view like
8’0" x 11’7"
which would display as 8'0" x 11'7"
but I think for the CSS class names in the template it really needs the actual double quotes so we don't want to encode that.
Best,
Joe