[DGReader]

Hi. I'm sorry if this has already been covered, but I've been searching the site for the last 20 minutes and haven't found anything written about the subject of curly quotes, a.k.a. typographer's quotes, a.k.a. quotation marks (as opposed to "inch marks" which is what "straight quotes" really are).

Okay, I know that for some people this is nitpicking. But I've been seeing a lot of ePubs out there without good typography. To me it makes a big difference when I see proper slanted or curly quotation marks (‘ ’) and (“ ”) instead of straight inch marks (' ') or foot marks (" ") around quotations.

Isn't ePub basically XML with CSS? If so, then its native character set should be Unicode. Unicode character sets allow for the native inclusion of extra characters such as true ellipses (…) rather that three periods in a row (...), letters with accents in them (résumé instead of resume), etc. There shouldn't even be the necessity to "escape" characters as there is with some flavors of HTML. It shouldn't be hard, then, to write a book for the ePub format with good typography.

If I wanted to take a published, non–DRM-protected ePub file and reformat it to make all the inch marks and foot marks become double quotes and single quotes, how would I do that? I am flummoxed by Calibre. I downloaded it for my Mac and I don't even know where to begin. It reminds of of GraphicConverter with all its endless functions. I looked to see if there were a way to replace straight quotes with curly quotes, and I couldn't find a straightforward one. Is there one?

P.S. Yes, I know that search-and-replace doesn't always work with inch and foot marks, because sometimes a foot mark is a single open quote and sometimes it should be a single close quote or apostrophe.

P.S.S. This may be <em>really</em> picky, but is it possible to design an ePub to have ligatures such as fi ( fi ), ff ( ff ) ffi ( ffi ), etc.?