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Old 08-30-2017, 04:29 AM   #11
Tex2002ans
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Posts: 2,306
Karma: 13057279
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo Forma, Nook
Quote:
Originally Posted by evil writer View Post
I recently tried setting the single apostrophe key on my keybaord to give a curly apostrophe in sigil because I never use a straight apostrophe and it was annoying having to always pull down the "insert special character" menu or find and replace straights with curlies after finishing a book (especially as find and replace had to be done one-by-one as sometimes the apostrophes would end up the wrong way around).
I would suggest a different method:

Just type using dumb quotes + dumb apostrophes, and then run the completed book through a Smarten Punctuation.

DiapDealer created plugins for both Sigil and Calibre:

Sigil: PunctuationSmarten Plugin

Calibre: Diap's Editing Toolbag (I suggest this over the default Calibre Smarten Punctuation, because it handles more nuanced situations [disabling ... -> ellipsis, etc. etc.])

After you run either of those plugins, all you have to do is search for and replace the handful of exceptions.

For example, I use this Regular Expression:

Search: ‘(Em|em|Til|til|Tis|tis|Twas|twas)
Replace: ’\1

That would take an incorrect sentence like "Go Get ‘Em Tiger", and correctly flip the LEFT single quote to a RIGHT single quote.

There are other odd situations you have to look out for that the algorithms might botch, like around italics or em dashes, but the algorithms get it correct for the most part.

From there, there are a few other tools that check if you have any mismatching quotation marks such as:

Quote:
Whoops, I made a mistake.”
“Whoops, I made another.
”And I made yet another!”
The best one, by far, is Toxaris's "Dialogue Check" in his EPUB Tools (this requires Microsoft Word):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=213372

Another program is LanguageTool:

https://www.languagetool.org

Last edited by Tex2002ans; 08-30-2017 at 04:37 AM.
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