Unquoted dialogue

[BetterRed]

I have a text file, scanned from typewritten pages, of an unpublished novel of ~300,000 words. It was written by a deceased person, the daughter would like to publish it, if only for family and friends. She's asked me if there's a way to automate wrapping the dialogue in quotes.

It's quite hard to read the text without the quotes. There is no other copy, just some hand written story line notes, and exploratory fragments.

Any ideas? Apart from double space printing, oodles of time, and a pot of red ink

BR

[Toxaris]

If there is no visual distinction between dialogue and normal text, it will be impossible to automate this. After all, the algorithms need something to work with. If you can make the distinction without reading it, it should be possible. It will need to be proofread though.

[HarryT]

Certainly no way to automate the process. Get the daughter to do it if she's the one who wants to publish it. Certainly not your problem.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

If there is no visual distinction between dialogue and normal text, it will be impossible to automate this. After all, the algorithms need something to work with. If you can make the distinction without reading it, it should be possible. It will need to be proofread though.

I was hoping someone might know of some super-smart lexical/semantic analysis tool, but given the weakness of grammar analysis tools I suspect its a hope forlorn. Especially something that one could apply to one book.

Might try to recruit a 'crowd' from my writerly friends - couple of chapters each should see the job done pretty quick.

A retired professional has put her hand up to do some substantive editing - provided we can get the dialogue punctuated.

It'll be interesting to see what suggestions the daughter will brook, there's bound to be more than a few.

@HarryT - it is 'my problem' since the daughter asked me if I could help. Saying no at the first hurdle would weigh on my conscience - I'm funny that way.

BR

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@HarryT - it is 'my problem' since the daughter asked me if I could help. Saying no at the first hurdle would weigh on my conscience - I'm funny that way.

Sorry, I didn't express myself very well. I simply meant that if she wants it done, why not get her to do that aspect of the work herself, while you do the more complex stuff? Asking you to help surely doesn't mean leaving you to do all the work yourself, does it? Shouldn't it be a joint endeavour?

[Doitsu]

@BetterRed:

It might be possible to write some kind of simple parser if one or more of the following conditions are met:

• A limited number of protagonists talk to each other. (E.g., character A only talks to character B and vice versa.)
• The writer consistently used the same verbs and syntax for quotes or paraphrases.
• The writer used indents, additional white-space and/or other typewriter style formatting to indicate dialogues.

Can you post one or two typical pages?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Sorry, I didn't express myself very well. I simply meant that if she wants it done, why not get her to do that aspect of the work herself, while you do the more complex stuff? Asking you to help surely doesn't mean leaving you to do all the work yourself, does it? Shouldn't it be a joint endeavour?

The daughter should be able to deal with the 'complex' stuff, it's plain novel style text, she's a dab hand with Autocad, Quark, Photoshop etc, and SMS and Twitter I doubt she'll 'publish' it commercially, unless the editor suggests she really should, shouldn't be much effort to slap some front matter and a cover on it.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

@BetterRed:

It might be possible to write some kind of simple parser if one or more of the following conditions are met:

• A limited number of protagonists talk to each other. (E.g., character A only talks to character B and vice versa.)
• The writer consistently used the same verbs and syntax for quotes or paraphrases.
• The writer used indents, additional white-space and/or other typewriter style formatting to indicate dialogues.

Can you post one or two typical pages?

@Doitsu - there are dozens of characters, lots of dialogue. I'm sure it would take a lot longer to figure out an algo, implement and test it, than to do it by hand. If you're truly interested, then when we've done the first chapter I can send you before and after files -- with owners permission of course.

It was typed on an IBM Selectric by an electrical engineer - daughter doesn't know why he didn't type ",s or ',s . . . maybe the key was broken

Whilst Windows 10 was installing itself this morning I made some calls, four people have volunteered to do a couple of chapters each. I also fiddled around with Word's 'spell checker' last night - quite a few of its "Grammar and Style" errors are resolved when the quotes and punctuation are corrected - maybe we can use that as a first pass.

BR

[Jellby]

Any book like that should be proofread. It should't be too difficult to add some mark to every dialogue line during the proofreading, and then processing these marks and adding the quotes could be semi-automated. Care should be taken with some complex stuff, like several characters speaking in the same paragraph, or speech spanning several paragraphs, or containing poetry, etc.

You could also leave it without quotes and call it "conceptual". If the writer didn't use quotes, maybe that's what he wanted. Did he use quotes for anything else?

In French, dialogues lines are marked with an em-dash at the beginning, but there is no indication of where the spoken text is interrupted by the narrator, other than normal punctuation, like this:

—What's that? he asked
—It's just some dialogue, she answered, in French style.
—And how can you tell what belongs where? It looks pretty confusing
—Well, you see, you have to read it.
—I asked my friend the same question, interrupted a third person, she answered pretty much the same.
—Gee, this last line is a good one.

Leaving out the em-dashes wouldn't be such a big change.

[BetterRed]

@Jellby - AFAIK the author didn't write any other 'creative' texts, just engineering specs and business corro :lol: There is nothing apart from disjoint punctuation and context to indicate speech. There are places where several characters appear to speak in the one paragraph, but its hard to be absolutely certain. And there appears to be speech spanning multi paras again with nothing distinguishing

First task is to get it to a state where the editor can make head of tail of it. She's had a quick skim - "There's something there, but I can go any further unless someone put *&^%$ quotes around the $%^&* speech--single quotes, punctuation inside please."

BR

[Jellby]

While you are at it, make sure you distinguish left single quotes and apostrophes, or it will be another hell if later someone wants to change single quotes to double quotes (or for automatic sanity checks).

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by Jellby

If the writer didn't use quotes, maybe that's what he wanted.

Yes, it's a perfectly legitimate decision by an author not to use quotes. William Morris, for instance, didn't use quotes in "The Wood Beyond the World" (even if later editions added them), but I've seen this by other authors, too. If the text is difficult to read without quotes, maybe the author wanted it to be difficult to read. You can only guess at the author's intentions, of course, but there is a life without quotation marks -- classic Latin and Greek didn't have them either, for instance, and this didn't keep them from writing great literature.