How to convert straight quotes to smart 'curly' typographer's quotes

[bookman156]

I have an EPUB from a publisher that I'm doing some editing work on in Sigil. But it has been produced using straight quotes instead of smart quotes, same goes for the apostrophes.

I'm wondering if there is a way to change the XHTML files to smart quotes. It may be automatic in Word, but I'm not sure how to do it in an EPUB.

I use Sigil for editing.

Anyone have any ideas?

[eschwartz]

I know calibre has a builtin tool for that (both in conversion and in the Editor), not sure about Sigil.

It should be easy to do with a plugin though -- maybe someone has already made one.

EDIT: Yes, DiapDealer's PunctuationSmarten plugin is your friend.

[bookman156]

Ah, thanks!

That looks like what I need.

[HarryT]

Be warned, though, that these automated methods are not 100% reliable. After using them, you really do need to go through and check for errors manually. The tools are a good first step, but not a complete solution (not, at least, if you want to publish the book. Obviously if it's just for your personal use, you may not be concerned about a few mistakes.).

Tools tend to have problems with words with initial apostrophes, particularly in books where the single apostrophe is also used for speech marks.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Tools tend to have problems with words with initial apostrophes, particularly in books where the single apostrophe is also used for speech marks.

Absolutely true, it is also depending on the language. I use multiple S&R commands to get it right. You can do it all automatic, as lang as you program it right.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Absolutely true, it is also depending on the language. I use multiple S&R commands to get it right. You can do it all automatic, as lang as you program it right.

It really is almost impossible to get it right programmatically. Consider the following:

What the 'ell are you doin'?

and:

'Today is Thursday', he said.

Same pattern of quotes, but the first example has two closing quotes, while the second has an opening and a closing quote. Any tool should get the second example right. It's the first one that'll break the automated tool and need to be corrected manually.

Toxaris, how would you distinguish between these two cases, programmatically?

[WillAdams]

And of course, there’s the matter of using primes and double primes for foot and inch marks, and stick quotes at need for actual computer code. To expand on Harry's example, one which I've used in the past is:

“She was 5′2″, with eyes of blue, ‘’struth’.”

More on this at: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questio.../248039#248039

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Be warned, though, that these automated methods are not 100% reliable.

Indeed. I use WordStar, an old DOS word processor, and WS doesn't do curly quotes (or em dashes, for that matter). So whenever I open a file in Word, I must clean up those omissions. Where Word fails every time (and where I suspect every automagical repair tool would fail) is words that have been truncated by omitting initial letters or syllables, such as the 'ell for hell you cited earlier.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The tools are a good first step, but not a complete solution (not, at least, if you want to publish the book

which doesn't mean there aren't published books (from mainstream publishers) filled with wrong quotes/apostrophes.

[fbrzvnrnd]

You can also use RegEx, like

"[A-Z].+?"

to get book titles for example

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

You can also use RegEx, like

"[A-Z].+?"

to get book titles for example

I don't see the relevance of this to converting straight quotes to curly quotes. Can you elaborate?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It really is almost impossible to get it right programmatically. Consider the following:

What the 'ell are you doin'?

and:

'Today is Thursday', he said.

Same pattern of quotes, but the first example has two closing quotes, while the second has an opening and a closing quote. Any tool should get the second example right. It's the first one that'll break the automated tool and need to be corrected manually.

Toxaris, how would you distinguish between these two cases, programmatically?

If the text in which the straight quote appears at beginning of a word is itself within dialogue quotes, then one could replace it with the closing single curly quote ( ’ ).

The ability to detect and correct mismatched dialogue quotes is a feature of Toxaris' EPUBTools add-in for Word so maybe the above would be possible - as a final phase in dialogue checking.

And if it's not in dialogue then what the ’ell is it doing there anyway, in which case Toxaris' could make use of his new Mark Text tool to highlight the offending text with a suitable tag and colour

Not sure if/how the above would work with UK dialogue marking (single quotes). Aside: I prefer double quotes on displays; but I loathe them on paper - they're almost invariably obtrusive, they tend to stand out like [...].

BR

[JSWolf]

What I would like is a way to convert UK style quotes to US style quotes because UK style quotes just look unnatural.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I would like is a way to convert UK style quotes to US style quotes because UK style quotes just look unnatural.

One brute force way to do it is to replace all singles with doubles and then either correct the spelling mistakes in the contractions - some spell checkers are better at that than others, or use a regex replace of [a-z]"[a-z] with \1’\2.

Maybe it's yet another feature Toxaris could offer in his Word add-in as part of dialogue checking

BR

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I would like is a way to convert UK style quotes to US style quotes because UK style quotes just look unnatural.

It all boils down to distinguishing between right single quote and apostrophe. Unfortunately, in Unicode they are the same character (a design mistake, I'd say). If using entities, I've used ’ for the former and ’ for the latter, but that doesn't help when the editor changes all entities to characters (and it makes the code messy).