I guess it's too late to help, but I've just finished fiddling with a
script to help me scan for the apostrophe / open-quote problem, by skipping over unambiguous cases like
'Hullo!' she shouted.
It should be pretty helpful for UK-style novels which use single-quotes for dialog.
It's designed to handle most html markup. (Argh, it doesn't handle ' ! But I can fix that easily enough.).
No documentation yet, other than what you get from "quotes.py --help". It's possible to learn what it does in particular cases by running it on the example files in the
GitHub repository.
Basically, the ambiguities that remain get marked with a "*", and then you can search the output for that. It also checks for stuff like open-quotes with no matching close-quote, which is marked with a "#".
<p>‘Twasn’t my fault #[‘]</p>
On the flip side, that means it triggers on multi-paragraph dialogue, where the convention is to omit all but the last closing quote.
<p>‘You know what happens if you talk too much? No? I'll tell you what. #[‘]</p>
<p>‘You get a whole ’*nother paragraph of dialogue.’</p>
[but you can avoid those and just get the "*"s, by running it as "quotes.py --apostrophes"].