How to convert straight quotes to smart 'curly' typographer's quotes

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

And of course, there’s the matter of using primes and double primes for foot and inch marks

Oh, is THAT what they're called? In desperation, I have been calling them "marks." (Quoting a bunch of combat reports that use the prime/mark/Thing instead of "feet.")

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Oh, is THAT what they're called? In desperation, I have been calling them "marks." (Quoting a bunch of combat reports that use the prime/mark/Thing instead of "feet.")

Me too. I call them 'marks' when they designate measurement, and 'primes' when they're used in mathematics (or apparently the Haskell programming language - babble on, babble on)

BR

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I have to remark here that Word does a fairly job

Do you? Okay, if that's how you see it. ;-) My comment about Word wasn't in relation to this particular search-and-replace, but that I think it's a pretty horrid application overall. It's not my choice of word processor by a long chalk.

and it cannot be expected to replace common sense and education.

Of course. Not sure why you seem to be lecturing me. My comment was that it's not imo an acceptable situation when even professional publishers don't bother making the effort to clean up the bits a quick run through Word and then Calibre can't get right automatically. But I have so many commercial ebooks that seem not to have even been spelling-checked, so it's not surprising they haven't been proofread for punctuation or formatting. Dismaying and arguably unacceptable, but not surprising.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Which probably means that it will be correct in a few years, once all "old" people who care have died and the only "authority" remaining is whatever the computer's default gives.

I don't think it's going to take even that long! As I mentioned, this friend has a career in publishing, and she seems to have forgotten punctuation rules under the influence of what she simply sees most often, and will even argue vehemently for what she really should know to be wrong. The Internet, for all intensive purposes (sic), is often merely a mechanism for bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Do you? Okay, if that's how you see it. ;-) My comment about Word wasn't in relation to this particular search-and-replace, but that I think it's a pretty horrid application overall. It's not my choice of word processor by a long chalk.


Of course. Not sure why you seem to be lecturing me. My comment was that it's not imo an acceptable situation when even professional publishers don't bother making the effort to clean up the bits a quick run through Word and then Calibre can't get right automatically. But I have so many commercial ebooks that seem not to have even been spelling-checked, so it's not surprising they haven't been proofread for punctuation or formatting. Dismaying and arguably unacceptable, but not surprising.

Word is a fine Word processor, not better or worse than the rest. Some things it does better, others worse. It is not however a program specialized for writing books. You can do it, but there are better programs for that.

I am most definitely not lecturing you. It was just a general remark not aimed at you. These day and age a lot of people seem to think that computers/applications can do anything and that they don't have to think for themselves anymore. If you look for example at spelling used in Facebook, yuck.

Proofreading is very important, but also very expensive for publishers. This is even more so for self-publishing. That often leads to skipping that part. I created my Word add-in to reduce the errors (especially but not exclusively after OCR). Some parts automatic, some parts manually. For example it can convert straight-quotation marks to real quotation marks and check for missing quotation marks. Even if it finds a lot (sometimes all) errors in a document, documents would still require proofreading. There is no automatic tool that would replace that.

Again, not lecturing you. But perhaps other readers of the forum find it helpful.

[DaleDe]

I would agree that word is fairly good at doing smart quotes. Some word processors don't even try. Like everything else, one good feature does not make it perfect. Proofing of quotes is actually reasonable easy using a search and replace strategy. It takes work but you don't have to read the whole book to get it right.

Dale

[Jellby]

And remember that curly quotes are not smart quotes. "Smart quotes" is the feature that lets you enter a straight quote and converts it to the correct curly one. Once it's curled, it's not smart anymore

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

And remember that curly quotes are not smart quotes. "Smart quotes" is the feature that lets you enter a straight quote and converts it to the correct curly one. Once it's curled, it's not smart anymore

True enough, but once you have smart quotes turned on you can do a search for " and replace it with " and it will attempt to fix all the straight quotes in the document. Do it again with ' and ' and you have a starting point for doing what the OP wanted. You still will need to correct errors caused by the search/replace but you can use search again to find them.