Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
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.
|
Wow, I couldn't believe it!!! Same exact thing with LibreOffice!
It adds a left double quote after an em dash.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
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.
|
Indeed, I guess we are sort of speaking about slightly different tools. You are talking straight Smartening Punctuation, while I am talking more about a Smartening Punctuation "Plus".
Again, I just fall back to the example of Toxaris's fantastic EPUB Tools. It will double-check the Smart Quotes, and then ask for user input on these "unsure" cases (is this supposed to be two opening quotation marks in a row? There is a closing quote with no open quote? The algorithm detected there are two/three quotation marks in a row (like in that "prime" example), is this correct?).
One case discussing full automation, while another case is 90% automation, 10% human assistance. :P
Now that I think about it, is there any tools out there which would do similar checks for all the other punctuation? For example, you can choose if ellipses/em dashes/en dashes should be set open/closed.
I don't spend much time going from Style Guide A to Style Guide B, but there MUST be some tools out there to help editors speed up the process besides just a long list of Search/Replace.
Side Note: Now you have sent me down another rabbit hole of research... curse you DiapDealer!
