First, thanks to HarryT for his great work on the Illustrated David Copperfield available here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=54219
All the PD texts I've seen have the UK style single quotes. I prefer the US style double quotes, and also smart quotes, if possible.
Here are two editions I used as references:
Thomas Nelson and Sons 1906
http://books.google.com/books?id=Bg8WAAAAYAAJ
Houghton 1863
http://books.google.com/books?id=5PwKAAAAYAAJ
So I thought I'd make a quick attempt to convert HarryT's post from single quotes to double smart quotes. I'm good with regular expression search/replace, so I thought I could do it quickly. As I got farther into it, I realized a few things.
First, it took much longer than what I first thought. This book in particular may have been an especially poor choice to attempt such a conversion. Dickens uses a lot of punctuation such as:
“So th’ are, so th’ are!” cried Ham. “Well said! So th’ are. Mas’r Davy bor—gent’lmen growed—so th’ are!”
Second, I realized there are many different "editions" of this book. I have no idea what edition the Gutenberg text was scanned from, but it was a version with the single quotes, so I guess it was published in the UK. It seems Gutenberg has a mixture of the UK and US versions for Dicken's books.
Most of the smart quotes are correct in this version, but I'm sure there are a few mistakes. I may fix them as I read the book for the first time on my Kindle DX. If anyone has any interest in this version and wants to fix anything, post an updated version here or post a list of fixes.
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