Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
Dialogue checking can't be automated without some contextual analysis, consider this:
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Agreed... but with a small observation: you're conflating auto-
checking with auto-
smartening. My plugin is only concerned with the latter.
If you can't trust that the source material is quoted
correctly, sure, stopping to ask questions can be very useful. But if the source material is already properly quoted/proofed (albeit with straight quotes), the quotation spanning multiple paragraphs (and most dialogue, for that matter) is not that tricky to smarten automatically.
I make no bones about the fact that neither of my smartening plugins are proofing tools. They weren't meant to be. They certainly won't "fix" (or even notice) a missing closing quotation mark, but they will correctly smarten the quotation marks that are
there (in your example). That's all I've ever needed/asked them to do. *shrug*
If I have questionable source material that I suspect may be missing some quotation marks in dialogue, then I'd probably favor something like Tox's add on for that situation, too. But for the example you gave, auto-smartening would leave you no worse off than you were before—missing a closing quotation mark. And that's for the proofers to catch.
@Toxaris: you do great work. If I'm still IN the Word stage of a document, it's your tools/addons I'm using. I'm just not going to go from epub BACK to Word to gain a little quotation-proofing.