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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
There was also this topic a few years back which discussed Smarten Punctuation breaking due to spaces before/after quotation marks:
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Yes that would absolutely mess with most current smartening algorithms. However, I would think that kind of "typesetting" preference would be best applied post-production, anyway. After creation/smartening/whathaveyou.
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Which ALSO reminded me of another case where I have seen it break, is when a closing quote is right before/after an em or en dash. Again, I don't have any specific examples on hand, but I can recall it happening.
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I have no doubt this may have happened in the past, but I've not seen any instances of this in a long, long time. It is my contention that SmartyPants was/is often getting the blame for something that MS Word's on-the-fly smartening feature does by default. Turn that feature on in Word and type a line that starts with a quote; finishes with an emdash, and watch what happens to the closing quote after it's added.
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And I thought of another example while I was OCRing last night, where "quotations" just get MANGLED.
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I have no doubt. But surely you're not suggesting it should be the responsibility of a "smartening" algorithm to detect/correct OCR errors are you? I don't consider that as part of its purview myself. I consider it the user's responsibility to hand any automated smartening routine an essentially "correct" (just punctuationally "dumb") text. Garbage In/Garbage Out still very much applies.
We may be talking about very different needs here, too. You seem to be in search of "fixup" tools to assist in the conversion of existing texts from physical to digital. Whereas I'm more focused on tools that will allow an "editor" to take content (from creative types) that is essentially correct (just typed with traditionally dumb characters/keyboards) and "smarten" it.