Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
No, it was an example of a likely false positive with the rules above 
Granted, you can eliminate false positives with your two pass method, but there could be literally hundreds of them, often many more than real "internal dialogue" phrases.
As for false negatives, I often find dialogues (internal or not) that just omit the "he said", "she thought", etc. words. One should also look for "he said to himself" or "he wondered", or "he secretly admited", etc.
An automated tool can be of some help, but the danger is letting the user rely solely on the tool, which can be worse than just leaving the "internal dialogues" unformatted. Similarly, when I see curly quotes wrongly oriented I would prefer they had been left as straight quotes instead. |
You are completely right.
My hope is to make pacify into a tool that can alleviate a lot of eBook preparation "monkey work" from my shoulders. But yes, it's important to be clear which operations are reasonably likely to be foolproof, and which ones are sure to require thorough looking-over by a human being.
If somebody wants all internal dialogue typeset though... even fixing just 50% through poor pattern-matching/semi-automation reduces the outstanding work considerably.
Not something I'd ever do for myself, to be honest... but, so long as one understands what one is looking for, and what the limitations are, probably not hard to throw together something that would be helpful.
- Ahi