Quote:
Originally Posted by DrNefario
Whenever I write anything it has neither em dashes nor proper quotation marks! since my keyboard features neither. I have to make do with - and ". If I ever published anything it would need to be converted somehow. And not automatically corrected by a "helpful" piece of software later in the chain.
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If you use regular dashes where you want em dashes, no converter in the world will be able to correct that for you. If you don't want to use a script to do it for you, then you will be limited to exactly one option: going through the document manually and making/approving each and every change.
If your eventual goal is publication with typographic quotes and em/en dashes, it's best to just put them in from the getgo. Most keyboards don't have those keys, but most modern word processing applications provide their own keyboard shortcuts for inserting them (and most OSes have their own shortcuts as well).
It's become almost second nature for me to use ALT + 0147 and ALT + 0148 on Windows for typographic quotes (and ALT + 0151 for emdashes/ALT + 0145 and ALT + 0146 for single quotes/apostrophes). I believe Word has even shorter keystrokes for doing so. *shrug*
The other option is to get a publisher who'll take care of it for you.
