Quote:
Originally Posted by GrannyGrump
Using nbsp between them does seem to keep them welded together, but adding spaces is not standard typography for American text. No space at all, at all, *ought* to work the same way as nbsp.
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Are you sure about that? According to my knowledge, to be typographically correct, it should actually be a THIN SPACE between the inner single quote + the outer double quote. (I remember deliberately looking this one up when I thought they were errors in a few of the books I was OCRing). I also asked our typographer if that was proper, and she told me thin spaces between inner+outer quotes are correct.
I also quickly looked it up on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Spacing
Quote:
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There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility may suggest that a non-breaking space ( ) or thin space ( ) be inserted.
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I don't have any Manuals of Style on hand to give other input.
Sometimes these obscure rules are hard to actually find info on.
What I personally do, for easy coding purposes (and that line splitting problem in EPUBs/MOBIs), I just settled on jamming them together with these Search/Replaces:
LEFT QUOTES:
Search: “ ‘
Replace: “‘
RIGHT QUOTES:
Search: ’ ”
Replace: ’”
I guess you could easily just replace with:
Replace (Alt): “ ‘
Replace (Alt): ’ ”
Of course, in UK English, the single/double quotes would be flipped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
The character U+2060 (word joiner, & #8288;) should do what you want. But the reader should not break the lines at those points to start with. I don't know if this character is properly supported, and I'm a bit reluctant to include clutter (it makes editing and searching more difficult) in order to work around a clear bug (or we should maybe start writing this character before every comma and fullstop, and around every accented letter, just in case...).
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I doubt that Unicode char is properly supported, it will most likely show up as ? or boxes on most devices.
And I too try to avoid sticking too many entities throughout the code, although in this case, I don't think its inclusion would be TOO bad. It is quite rare, and I don't believe it would severely effect search. Unless it occurred left and right throughout the entire book.
This entire situation reminds me of including quotation marks/punctuation inside of italics as well. I just strip nearly ALL punctuation to lay outside of italics. While not typographically correct, it saves me A MASSIVE amount of time from cleaning up OCR. You would have to go through the entire book on a case-by-case basis and figure out which actually belong in the italics, and which don't. (I only fix up the italics in the relatively rare cases of italic punctuation in headings).