Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Text editors/word processors have no problem with a closing quote following an emdash. None whatsoever. Certain incarnations of certain popular algorithms for "smartening" punctuation, however, have been known to produce the effect you've pointed out; when they're asked to magically fix all the "dumb" punctuation that someone typed into a text editor.
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The attachment show Word 2007 - to get the correct close quote on the second dialogue fragment I typed double quote twice and deleted the first one.
I don't have OOo Writer on this machine but I have the same problem there - its not the latest version, and I saw the same problem in Jutoh when I had it.
And then there is this
https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1286477 (its referring to hyphen and close quotes) I'm pretty sure there was a similar report referring to em dash, but I think that's now fixed.
The so-called 'smart editor' I mentioned is on my Mint netbook - Top Editor or something, the defective algorithm is also in it, it was only developed last year - its not very good so I should bin it.
I'd always assumed the problem was peculiar to Word, it was in 2003 and maybe earlier, its in 2007 and 2010 (see
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/o...5-aba87a974430), not sure about 2013.
Its only since I started editing ebook fiction that I've seen the problem manifest elsewhere. So I started to question my assumption - that it's a MS bug. And that made me wonder if there's some arcane typographical reason, or that the CMS is wrong etc - hence my question here.
But if it really is a bug in some algo, then why doesn't someone rewrite the algo, and write dissertation on how they did it. I'm gobsmacked that the same 'bug' has been popping up in so many places over such a long time - if it was isolated to MS Word then... Maybe it was inherited from Xerox Star or Wang WP.
BR