change British quotes to American quotes

[lumpynose]

I'm working on a book written by an American author where it's using British style single quotes, downloaded from archive.org. The PDF for it that I downloaded from archive.org shows American style double quotes.

I would like to change the quotes to American style double quotes.

I looked at the Sigil plugin page here but didn't see anything obvious. Is there a plugin I overlooked? Or does someone have some regular expressions that will fix this?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by lumpynose

I'm working on a book written by an American author where it's using British style single quotes, [...] I would like to change the quotes to American style double quotes.

This same question gets asked many times over the years...

There isn't a magical way to do it. It's a lot of hard work and elbow grease, and you'll probably be introducing a lot of wrongly flipped ones that have to be manually found/corrected.

I believe the last time I wrote about this was in 2016, about halfway down my Post #26 in "How to convert straight quotes to smart 'curly' typographer's quotes".

I explained the approximate method I use to go from:

American “” (Outer) ‘’ (Inner) <-> British ‘’ (Outer) “” (Inner).

You'll also have to handle punctuation inside/outside the quotation marks.

Originally Posted by lumpynose

The PDF for it that I downloaded from archive.org shows American style double quotes.

My advice, work from a PDF that matches the kind of punctuation you intend. It would probably introduce less errors.

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

This same question gets asked many times over the years...

There isn't a magical way to do it. It's a lot of hard work and elbow grease, and you'll probably be introducing a lot of wrongly flipped ones that have to be manually found/corrected.

My advice, work from a PDF that matches the kind of punctuation you intend. It would probably introduce less errors.

Ok, thanks. I do have the pdf so there is that.

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

This same question gets asked many times over the years...

Big sigh of relief; GrannyGrump did this book awhile ago and she did all the hard work of fixing the quotes and she is OK with me using hers as the starting place. My goal is to make "lite" ebooks with no images or embedded fonts so I wanted to ask her first before gutting and ripping out all of the stuff she's done.