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Old 03-07-2008, 08:18 AM   #23
Richard Herley
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Posts: 203
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Norfolk, England
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hadrien View Post
Curly quotes isn't that easy to fix. Tried a few reg exp patterns (we use reg exp on Feedbooks to turn the text into the right format) but it always ended up pretty badly. Not sure that you can automatically turn normal quotes into curly quotes. It would be very useful if someone found the right patterns to make this work.
Thanks for the detailed response -- don't bother with the email now

I've found that the MS-Word smartquote auto-replace is no good, but there's quite a good one in Mellel. The rules for quotation marks (as opposed to apostrophes and indications of omission or elision) are quite simple -- any quote mark preceded by a new paragraph or whitespace is 99% certain to be an open-quote; the rest are close-quotes.

As for the others, the source text should be properly marked up, as follows:

` = open-single-quote
' = close-single-quote, apostrophe, and elision/omission

Faulty open-single-quotes (marked up as ' rather than ` in the source) can be found quite quickly if the dialogue is indicated by double (") rather than single (') quotes, otherwise it's a chore.
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