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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] using curly quotes for epubs -- best practices?


Hi Robert,

I avoid the issue entirely by using the DocBook <quote> element.

The <quote> element gives you language appropriate quotation marks, and it will also handle quotes within quotes, which is a nice touch.

I don’t know of any automated smart quote processing in the DocBook stylesheets (in fact, I’m nearly certain there isn’t any, beyond processing <quote>).

If you have existing text with curly or straight quotes in the source, converting them can be a bit tricky. I use emacs macros to replace quoted text with <quote>…</quote>, and that works surprisingly well. I match on the opening quote, capture everything until the ending quote, then replace with <quote>captured text</quote>. You need to be careful, since misplaced quotes can cause some strange results, and you need to handle both curly and straight opening and closing quotes, but generally it works well.

I think you can do something similar in Oxygen, but I haven’t done it myself. Check out this page and look for the discussion about “capturing groups": https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/18/ug-editor/topics/find-replace-dialog.html

I hope that helps.

Best regards,
Dick Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
hamilton@xmlpress.net



> On Nov 30, 2017, at 16:13, Robert Nagle <idiotprogrammer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Up to now I've avoided dealing with the issue of smart quotes (curly quotes)  by simply dealing with straight quotes in my docbook source. 
> 
> About 75% of my source comes from MS Word, and I then find some way to paste or convert into Docbook XML. 
> 
> Another 25% comes from .txt or from content I actually edit in Docbook. 
> 
> When I paste from MS Word to HTML, I often would get encoding errors. Even when I didn't get encoding errors, the conversion would be inconsistent or difficult to proof. 
> 
> Personally I could care less about smart quotes vs. curly quotes, and honestly I believe that the reading system should be handling the conversion from straight to curly quotes, but if the work involved in getting curly quotes was minimal enough, I'd consider doing it. 
> 
> I was wondering whether anyone here has created  best practices to make sure curly quotes are consistently implemented. (Does Docbook have anything to do with it?). I use Oxygen, but I don't see any option in Author mode to use only curly quotes. 
> 
> I usually just paste .txt files into a docbook file in  Author mode of Oxygen. I don't really know of an easy way to do search/replace without requiring a lot of quality control. Does anyone have any ideas? 
> 
> Thanks for your input. 
> 
> Robert Nagle
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Robert Nagle
> 22118 FINCASTLE DR KATY TX 77450-1727
> (Cell) 832-251-7522; (Skype) idiotprogrammer;  Carbon Neutral Since Jan 2010
> 



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