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NatCh, your suggestion about spaces before or after is correct, and I've been doing that, but there are situations where it does not apply. Especially with the first author I've been working at converting, who tends to use a lot of m-dashes to interject comments within speeches, you get a lot of ---"text and text"--- and you cannot just assume that the text is quote or commentary.
Why bother? Well, I brought up textquotes specifically in relation to the use of rtf2latex2e. If anyone is going to bother using LaTeX, then there is a higher probability that they have a higher interest in the niggling details of fine typography, making ebooks look like books and not just text files. And text quotes is just one such detail, along with the proper use of hyphens, n-dashes, and m-dashes, ligatures, proper spacing after sentences but not abbreviations, non-breaking spaces, widows and orphans, etc. Thankfully, LaTeX takes care of most of those things automatically, but not the quotes thing.
That's useful only if one cares. I'm not a type-fascist myself, but the iLiad screen is so nice, I thought I might expend the effort for at least a few books just so I have something worthy of the screen. But I find just the plain PDF output from OO reads just fine as well. And the manybooks.net output for iLiad looks really very good.
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