Preserving smart quotes

[petkusj]

I've seen a few Kindle books that display typewriter quotes instead of typographic quotes or that display quotes as some other incorrect character, so I thought I'd offer a few hints here about preserving typographic quotes that are also on my blog at http://mallardpress.blogspot.com/201...-encoding.html

The Kindle uses MOBI files, of course, and the Kindle prefers you use the Latin-1 encoding, which makes life great if your workflow, like mine is the following: Write in Word, create separate HTML files in Dreamweaver, build an EPUB in Sigil and use calibre to convert the EPUB to MOBI.

Yes, I know that sounds complicated and it is, but it works great for me because I have great control over the whole process, which allows me to preserve things like typographic quotes. If you're unfamiliar with them, typographic quotes are true open and close quotes that subconsciously tells a reader this is the start of a quote and this is the end of a quote. Typographers call them sixes and nines because most serif fonts display them looking like single or double sixes and nines.

If you've written your book in Microsoft Word, you've probably seen them because Word automatically converts typewriter quotes into the appropriate open and close quotes. But if you copy text from a Word document and paste it into a Dreamweaver document, you'll be pasting unencoded quotes that will probably not display properly on the Kindle unless you specified that the Dreamweaver document uses the Latin-1 encoding, which as I said earlier the Kindle prefers. However, make sure you're pasting your Word text into the Design view, not the Code view or this trick won't work.



Unfortunately, there is a drawback to this method if you're creating EPUBs, which prefers the UTF-8 encoding, but all is not lost. When you pasted your Word text into the Latin-1 encoded Dreamweaver page, Dreamweaver converted the quotes and other special characters into named HTML entities, such as “ and ’ -- or left double quote and right single quote. In the Code view, do a search and replace and change “ into the corresponding numeric entity “

After you've done the search and replace, change the encoding of your Dreamweaver document to UTF-8.

You can find lists of named HTML entities and their corresponding numeric entities around the web, but I've included a short list at the blog entry listed at the beginning of this post.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by petkusj

like mine is the following: Write in Word, create separate HTML files in Dreamweaver, build an EPUB in Sigil and use calibre to convert the EPUB to MOBI.

...

Unfortunately, there is a drawback to this method if you're creating EPUBs, which prefers the UTF-8 encoding, but all is not lost. When you pasted your Word text into the Latin-1 encoded Dreamweaver page, Dreamweaver converted the quotes and other special characters into named HTML entities, such as “ and ’ -- or left double quote and right single quote. In the Code view, do a search and replace and change “ into the corresponding numeric entity “

Easier to just convert Word RTF to epub with Calibre, that keeps all your quotes. Most of what you could do in Dreamweaver you can do in Sigil if the end product is epub. Sometimes you need to do a bit of fine tuning of the html for mobi, but you need to do that after converting from epub.

[petkusj]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Easier to just convert Word RTF to epub with Calibre, that keeps all your quotes. Most of what you could do in Dreamweaver you can do in Sigil if the end product is epub. Sometimes you need to do a bit of fine tuning of the html for mobi, but you need to do that after converting from epub.

I'm sure that method works well too, although I've not explored it. calibre is pretty amazing what it can do. I just naturally turn to Dreamweaver, especially as I need html files for the browser based readers I've created.

[Todd Young]

You know, I simply upload a word file with the quotes (sixes and nines) and I don't have any problem at all.