Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Mind posting your steps please? Thanks.
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Nothing has really changed in the American “” (Outer) ‘’ (Inner) <-> British ‘’ (Outer) “” (Inner)...
See
the 2016 topic, "How to convert straight quotes to smart 'curly' typographer's quotes" (especially my post #26, but read the entire topic). Same exact people have the same exact comments 4 years later.
But I'll go into a bit more detail here.
Flipping Inner/Outer Quotes
The vast majority could be flipped with no issue (using Jellby's "intermediate symbol" method):
- “ -> ¬
- ” -> |
- ‘ -> ¦
- ’ -> @
(Personally, I wouldn't use the @, too common. But you can pick any obscure Unicode characters, like ¤ CURRENCY SIGN (U+00A4))
Then you just have to search/replace the INNER/OUTER symbols to their opposite.
Outer -> Inner:
Inner -> Outer:
* * *
"Actual Apostrophe" Note: You could do this pass before or after substition. It's up to you.
Look for very common apostrophe word-endings:
Mark those with a different symbol for "actual apostrophe" (let's pick the ¤ CURRENCY SIGN):
You could even mark those words that actually use a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE:
You'll also have to check possessives that end with s + apostrophe:
(These have to be decided on a case-by-case basis, because you don't know if it's the end of a quotation or not.)
* * *
Now you replace all those intermediate symbols with the new INNER/OUTER quotations.
Outer -> Inner:
Inner -> Outer:
"Actual Apostrophe":
Look For Mismatches
Afterwards, like the above 2016 topic discusses, you have to do a more thorough check (like Toxaris's Dialogue Check) which looks for mismatching sets of outer/inner quotes.
You could roughly get it with some Regex that looks for these in the same paragraph:
- opening quote + opening quote
- closing quote + closing quote
(If you're doing this, you'll probably want to do this while you still have "Actual Apostrophes" marked as ¤... so they don't interfere.)
Note: Pure Regex will definitely miss a few though. You need something slightly more intelligent that checks both forwards/backwards for mismatches (Toxaris's Dialogue Check is the only thing I know of that does this).
Note 2: Like Jellby says, there are typically a lot of wrong LEFT/RIGHT errors in lots of ebooks (especially around em dashes), so a program may want to squash a lot of those BEFORE doing the flipping steps.
Note 3: Depending on the language, you may have even more "actual apostrophes" in the middle of words... like French uses a lot of:
so another "actual apostrophe" check may just be assume anything in the middle of a word is one:
Search: (\w)’(\w)
Replace: \1¤\2