Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It really is almost impossible to get it right programmatically. Consider the following:
What the 'ell are you doin'?
and:
'Today is Thursday', he said.
Same pattern of quotes, but the first example has two closing quotes, while the second has an opening and a closing quote. Any tool should get the second example right. It's the first one that'll break the automated tool and need to be corrected manually.
Toxaris, how would you distinguish between these two cases, programmatically?
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If the text in which the straight quote appears at beginning of a word is itself within dialogue quotes, then one could replace it with the closing single curly quote ( ’ ).
The ability to detect and correct mismatched dialogue quotes is a feature of Toxaris' EPUBTools add-in for Word so maybe the above would be possible - as a final phase in dialogue checking.
And if it's not in dialogue then what the ’ell is it doing there anyway, in which case Toxaris' could make use of his new Mark Text tool to highlight the offending text with a suitable tag and colour
Not sure if/how the above would work with UK dialogue marking (single quotes). Aside: I prefer double quotes on displays; but I loathe them on paper - they're almost invariably obtrusive, they tend to stand out like [...].
BR