Is there a way to edit EPUB or Mobi files such that the Quotes are in BOLD?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Not sure about AUS but Canadian usage tends to allow using either. Just be consistent.

My Canuck editor is pretty strongly on the UK side, fwiw. She and I once had an argument, about something I'd written, in which she rather archly informed me that my quotes were "wrong." I had to show her definitive "stuff" on USA usage, lol.

We see so many books here, both US and UK/CAN/NZ, OZ, that I'm at the point where I almost have to stop and think.

What's vexing in the US is that it's not consistent here. The "rule" isn't the same for semi-colons, colons, questions marks, exclamation marks and who the frack knows for "interrobangs." (A solution in search of a problem...)

Hitch

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Not sure about AUS but Canadian usage tends to allow using either. Just be consistent.

The de facto UK usage is also to accept either, though clients may have strong views either way of course! The only time I'm inclined to argue is when they want BOTH in the same book :-)

I believe the younger generation has taken a dislike to the full stop. (That's period, for colonials. Though why you'd re-name a punctuation mark after a feminine inconvenience again escapes me.)

[JSWolf]

What we need to do world wide is get rid of single quotes for speech and make them double quotes and that includes any other country that uses different punctuation. The UK (IMHO) is using obsolete single quotes for a lot of books.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What we need to do world wide is get rid of single quotes for speech and make them double quotes and that includes any other country that uses different punctuation. The UK (IMHO) is using obsolete single quotes for a lot of books.

As long the usage is consistent, I don't care if they use single quotes, double quotes, guillemets or whatever else works.

And if we get rid of single quotes, what do we use to signify an embedded quote?

My dad said “Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his first inaugural address with the chilling words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.””

My dad said “Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his first inaugural address with the chilling words: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’”

Perhaps a contest to generate the quotes version of the eats shoots and leaves sentence?

Edit: Since this discussion has nothing to do with ebooks, I would suggest moving it to the Lounge if you wish to continue.

[lidao]

thank you Tex2002ans for taking the time to give a detailed reply! so im reading light novels that are quite long (1000 chapters+). They consist of about 50% dialogue 50% narration and thought. Sometimes there are unnecessary narrations(repeated explanations) while the dialogue is always important. So when i want to skim the unnecessary parts and reach the dialogue, having them boldened makes it better.

I got the idea from an epub that alrdy had dialogue boldened which made things much
easier.


so i do have calibre, but no other program(im not a programmer either). Could you kindly tell me what programs to use and how to do such a thing?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What we need to do world wide is get rid of single quotes for speech and make them double quotes and that includes any other country that uses different punctuation. The UK (IMHO) is using obsolete single quotes for a lot of books.

It's to save ink Not all UK books use single quotes for speech. You do need single quotes for nested quotes.
Sadly the ’ symbol is closing quote, possessive indication and missing letter(s) indication. Some missing letter indications can be at the start of a word and ‘smart quotes’ messes that. Also Irish and Scottish names like O'Neill, which is really for ‘ui’, and it's often incorrectly used for feet or hours, a single prime or at worst italic straight quote should be used.

It's totally lazy having ebooks and even paper books using " and ' for quotes. Those generally only belong in programming or typewriters, though the ' can be used in transliteration of words to English, the ’ is sometimes incorrectly used for that.

We use double quotes for outer level of speech but single quotes if it's a meta occurrence like ‘A’ is the first letter of the Roman-Latin alphabet.

Edit:
I don't see why French and about 18 other countries should drop «and», nor others drop „and“, also used by many countries. Nested quotes vary by country too. Welsh and Scottish allegedly use single quote outer, I suspect it varies. Irish is like UK English, it can use either system, though the double quote outer is common. Wikipedia is overly dogmatic and inaccurate on the Quotation Mark, but the English Wikipedia is highly USA centric.

[Sunlite]

You have a couple of ways to smarten the punctuation:

- In Calibre both 'Polish' and 'Update Epub' can smarten punctuation
- In the Calibre editor you can get a plug in for smarten punctuation
- you can use the conversion, but this will change the css in the book, too

For the actual changes
the first sugestion from Tex should work in most cases.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by lidao

I got the idea from an epub that alrdy had dialogue boldened which made things much easier.

Hmmmmmm... Well, just to reiterate, you should only use this in personal books, DEFINITELY NOT FOR SALE.

Originally Posted by lidao

so i do have calibre, but no other program(im not a programmer either). Could you kindly tell me what programs to use and how to do such a thing?

Calibre or Sigil works. They both edit EPUBs + the steps are extremely similar.

Note: MAKE SURE YOU SAVE A BACKUP COPY of your book. Regular expression are very powerful (and can completely break your book if you do them wrong).

* * *

1. Open Calibre.

2. Right-Click the book's title in the list, then press Edit Book.

This will open up Calibre's built-in ebook editor.

3. Press Ctrl+F to pop up the Find/Replace.

4. Below the Find/Replace textboxes, you should see 3 dropdowns and 2 checkboxes:

Mode: [Normal] + [All Text Files] + [Down]
Case Sensitive + Wrap

Change Mode to Regex.

5. Insert this regular expression in the boxes:

Search: (“[^”<]+”)
Replace: <b>\1</b>

6. DO NOT press "Replace All" yet.

Test your Regular Expression on a small set first:

Press "Find" to see if it highlights the correct text.

Press "Replace".

Make sure it does what you want. Then test again.

If it looks like it's working, then you can "Replace All".

Note: If anything goes seriously wrong, you can always Edit > Undo or Edit > Revert. Or as a last resort, go back to your original copy... you did make a backup, didn't you?

Originally Posted by lidao

thank you Tex2002ans for taking the time to give a detailed reply!

No problem.

Originally Posted by lidao

so im reading light novels that are quite long (1000 chapters+). They consist of about 50% dialogue 50% narration and thought. Sometimes there are unnecessary narrations(repeated explanations) while the dialogue is always important. So when i want to skim the unnecessary parts and reach the dialogue, having them boldened makes it better.

Sounds like poor writing to me.

But thanks for giving me the use-case.

[exaltedwombat]

I think you under-estimate your brain power. It's not hard to skim a paragraph and pick out the dialogue. Those inverted commas surrounding it are a good clue.

And read better books!

[lidao]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Hmmmmmm... Well, just to reiterate, you should only use this in personal books, DEFINITELY NOT FOR SALE.



Calibre or Sigil works. They both edit EPUBs + the steps are extremely similar.

Note: MAKE SURE YOU SAVE A BACKUP COPY of your book. Regular expression are very powerful (and can completely break your book if you do them wrong).

* * *

1. Open Calibre.

2. Right-Click the book's title in the list, then press Edit Book.

This will open up Calibre's built-in ebook editor.

3. Press Ctrl+F to pop up the Find/Replace.

4. Below the Find/Replace textboxes, you should see 3 dropdowns and 2 checkboxes:

Mode: [Normal] + [All Text Files] + [Down]
Case Sensitive + Wrap

Change Mode to Regex.

5. Insert this regular expression in the boxes:

Search: (“[^”<]+”)
Replace: <b>\1</b>

6. DO NOT press "Replace All" yet.

Test your Regular Expression on a small set first:

Press "Find" to see if it highlights the correct text.

Press "Replace".

Make sure it does what you want. Then test again.

If it looks like it's working, then you can "Replace All".

Note: If anything goes seriously wrong, you can always Edit > Undo or Edit > Revert. Or as a last resort, go back to your original copy... you did make a backup, didn't you?



No problem.



Sounds like poor writing to me.

But thanks for giving me the use-case.

I JUST tested this out and it works perfectly on a book ive alrdy read! Thank you so much for helping me. And just so you dont get the wrong idea, the books im reading are free to read online (amateur writers).

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Search: (“[^”<]+”)
Replace: <b>\1</b>

That will work for most cases. But not if a speech goes over several paragraphs. Then only the final para has a close quote.
In that case the <b> codes will overlap the <p> and you'll have a syntax error.
Don't know about Calibre, but in Sigil, F7 check will list all these and you can fix them manually by adding </b> to the end of paras and <b> to the opening quotes of intermediate ones.

I can't think of a way to completely automate this. I'd just do
Search: “ Replace: <b>“
Search: ” Replace: ”</b>

That will also screw up with extended speech, but simpler to fix as you just have to add closing </b> to intermediates paras.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

That will work for most cases. But not if a speech goes over several paragraphs. Then only the final para has a close quote.
In that case the <b> codes will overlap the <p> and you'll have a syntax error.

If there isn't a < or a closing quote, mine won't match.

So if you had an extended speech, my Regex would see:

• a single opening quote
• keep going until it hits the < in </p>
• and jump out, failing to match since there's no ”

As noted, mine also wouldn't work with any sort of formatting inside the quotes (<i>, <b>, <span>, etc.). It's just a very dumb, very quick, Regex... not meant to cover every case in the book, just the vast majority of "easy" cases.

Mine also wouldn't introduce any syntax errors... where a mass replace like you're suggesting has a high probability.

(ESPECIALLY since wrong/mismatched quotations are where a huge minority of typos are introduced, even in fully proofed/published books. [See discussion on Toxaris's EPUB Tools > Dialogue Check.])

Originally Posted by AlanHK

That will also screw up with extended speech, but simpler to fix as you just have to add closing </b> to intermediates paras.

I don't think so.

Let's say mine covers 95% of the normal cases, and misses the 5% extended speeches. But it replaces it in a single stroke.

Yours might cover "100%" of the cases, but then you have to spend time manually correcting 5%.

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Let's say mine covers 95% of the normal cases, and misses the 5% extended speeches. But it replaces it in a single stroke.

Yours might cover "100%" of the cases, but then you have to spend time manually correcting 5%.

As I said, I don't think there can be a perfect automatic conversion. If I were to do this, I would be compelled to do the manual work and get it right.

Reminds me of the "red letter" Bibles, where the words of Jesus are printed red. (Note that in the KJV, at least, they don't use quote marks.)

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

(ESPECIALLY since wrong/mismatched quotations are where a huge minority of typos are introduced, even in fully proofed/published books.

Exposing those so they could be fixed would be a bonus.

When I convert a print book to ebook, I often discover errors. If the print version has not been actually printed yet, I can fix that too.

I often do S&R that I know will make some errors, and then use the syntax error check to find the edge cases.

[Quoth]

I find those red letter editions a pain to read. Also they are a much later report of of what he said, probably in Aramaic, written down in a particular Greek dialect (not the same as Classical or Modern) and then translated to Latin. Then the KJV translated the Greek with the help of the Latin, but into a sort of religious English that wasn't ever really used for other books or speech. The current KJV isn't even that original KJV.

Those Red Letter editions were proofed and set by hand.


I'd certainly not want to read bolded dialogue, but good luck on the computer assisted formatting and human proofing to do it for your own use!

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Sounds like poor writing to me.

Sounds like a compilation of a serialised story.

If published as a single volume, should have all the recaps edited out.
That would be a better enhancement than bolding speech.
Might ask the writer(s) if they want that, it might make a saleable book out of it.

I think Twilight started as online fanfic...