Single quotes to double quotes?

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Adjust

I guess it's to each their own, type of thing...I personally like to see the correct spelling of words in the region I choose. Commonwealth titles being formatted using the correct spelling, quote makes, metric measurements (kilometre instead of kilometer). the commonwealth (well, where I am anyway) is becoming to "Americanised" as it is. (no offense to Americans here). I see to many people in my country spelling words how America spells them. When I read a book, these little things really stand out.

They do, don't they ?! [is it not Americanized ? ]

[alecE]

This may be of assistance - it's not very elegant (in fact it's totally lacking in elegance), but it works, eventually, for me:
In your favoured text editor (mine is NoteTab Lite) perform the following steps (note that the $ character is being used here to denote a space):
- replace all instances of ^P^P^P with ^P^P (triple para to double para)
- replace all instances of ^P^P with ||
- replace all instances of ^P with $
- replace all instances of || with </p>^P^P<p>
- add a leading <p> at start of document and a </p> at the end

You should now have a text that is neatly broken into paragraphs with zero hard line endings. Then:

- replace <p>' with <p>&ldquo;
- replace '</p> with &rdquo;</p>
- replace .'$ with .&rdquo;$
- ditto for comma, colon, semi-colon, query and bang followed by '$
- replace $' (or $" depending on text) with $&lsquo;
- use the above process to identify the '$ (or "$) and replace with &rsquo;$
Previous two steps should clean most of the quoted phrases ('Marie Celeste' eg and plural possessives survivors' eg)
- replace .$' with $&ldquo;
- ditto for comma, colon, semi-colon, query and bang followed by $'
- should be fairly safe now to replace all remaining instances of ' with &rsquo;

This is not bullet-proof, but does clean up the text reasonably well. I generally reckon on 1 to 2 hours doing the above plus other odds and sods before moving the text into Sigil, where the html entities will be translated into 'proper' text.

[Adjust]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

They do, don't they ?! [is it not Americanized ? ]

Wow congratulations to you. for pointing out spelling mistakes from a post on a forum written from an iPhone....

Anyway back to the conversation:
My point still stands.

[GeoffC]

Why does writing on an iPhone justify any mistakes

Okay, back on with the show ....

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

Why does writing on an iPhone justify any mistakes

It's a very small keyboard, and it has rather an "over-enthusiastic" auto-correction facility (eg it will always change "its" to "it's").

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's a very small keyboard, and it has rather an "over-enthusiastic" auto-correction facility (eg it will always change "its" to "it's").