Quote:
Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl
Yep. Those wrong leading apostrophe's have been popping up a lot for me lately (is there some special word for them?).
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I forget the specific term for them.
I just call them "shortened" or "cut-off" words/years.
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The most common one I see
everywhere is:
- ✗ Rock ‘n’ Roll
- ✓ Rock ’n’ Roll
and, just a few weeks back, I was grabbing a box of ice cream and saw:
- ✗ Cookies ‘n Cream
- ✓ Cooking ’n’ Cream
Seriously, these are multi-million dollar companies doing this junk!
One of these days, I really should create a social media account and take pictures of these horrible mistakes.
I'd probably get lots of free stuff!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl
I've got a quick 'n dirty Saved Search to find them:
Code:
Search: (\s)‘([a-z])
Replace: \1’\2
but that finds oodles of false positives. |
Even better, use the two I've been using since at least 2016:
Quote:
Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl
I don't know if it's a problem with what the author/publisher did or if it's to do with Calibre's Smarten Punctuation [...] But, I've been seeing a lot of the wrong version.
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It's because of relying on automatic smart quotes... but like Jellby said, they're dumb!
The basic "smarten punctuation" algorithms are just a tiny bit more complex than this:
1. If a space/nothing to the left OR letter to the right:
Insert Left Quote.
2. If letter/something to the left:
Insert Right Quote.
While that might work for 99%, it gets 1% wrong.
And 1% * tons of quotation marks = a hell of a lot wrong.
There are some really egregious errors which constantly get busted—like quotes around EM DASHES or <i>italics</i>—but you can catch/correct most of that 1% with a few simple regexes.
(Beyond that, I use Toxaris's Dialogue Check, which is
the ULTIMATE way of catching any and all nested/wrong quotes issues. The only bad thing is... it only works in Microsoft Word.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
There's nothing smart about them, [...] Those wrongly oriented curly quotes are probably the "smart quote" feature getting it wrong, so I think smart-ass quote is appropriate |
Agreed.
There's this one rant I wrote a few years back, but I can't find it now.
I explained this exact problem in extreme detail, especially the egregious "wrong quotes" that Word/LibreOffice do as you type and how "dumb" the algorithms are + how I couldn't believe it's still not fixed after all these
decades.
I swear it was in one of the threads where I described how Toxaris's EPUB Tools + Dialogue Check is the only way to properly nest/check ALL cases of wrong/missing/broken quotes.
- - -
With
Toxaris's EPUB Tools + Dialogue Check:
- 99.0% of quotes will be taken care of fine.
- 00.9% will be automatically corrected with a user's list of exceptions.
- (Similar to what my 2016 regexes linked above do.)
- ’em, ’tis, ’twas, [...]
- 00.1% require manual validation/correction.
- Toxaris's tool step-by-steps through the document with you, pointing out each case.
- Missing quotation marks.
- Two of same type in a row.
- [...]
It's also smart enough to:
- Ignore apostrophes in the middle of words.
- Multiple paragraphs in a row with only an OPEN QUOTE (very common in Fiction for very long dialogues).
so that throws away a whole class of false positives, so the stuff you're manually stepping through is very likely ACTUAL issues it caught.
(It saves SO MUCH TIME and has helped me catch HUNDREDS of actual typos I otherwise would've missed.)
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Side Note: I also explained
a similar method in 2020 on how to flip American<->British quotes.
If you wanted to do it the ol' manual way, there's ways of tagging most quotes/apostrophes differently.
But, honestly, ever since I tested Toxaris's... it blew everything else out of the water. I completely refuse to go back to the old ways.