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

[Ron Catterall <ron@catterall.net>]

I use entities to separate open an close single and double quotes, 's etc.  Conversion can be of 'straight' quotes can done to about the 90% level by looking at the environment of 'straight' quotes in a regex search throughout a set of files.

e.g.

<!ENTITY  apos             "&#x0027;">   <!--   single quote   -->
<!ENTITY  quot             "&#x0022;">   <!--   double quote   -->
<!ENTITY  lsquo            "&#x2018;">   <!--   left single quotation mark for quoted strings   -->
<!ENTITY  mylsq            "&#x2018;">   <!--   my left single quotation mark for quoted strings   -->
<!ENTITY  rsquo            "&#x2019;">   <!--   right single quotation mark for quoted strings   -->
<!ENTITY  myrsq            "&#x2019;">   <!--   my right single quotation mark for quoted strings   -->
<!ENTITY  mypos            "&#x2019;">   <!--   my possessive single quote   -->
<!ENTITY  ldquo            "&#x201C;">   <!--   left double quotation mark for quoted strings   -->
<!ENTITY  rdquo            "&#x201D;">   <!--   right double quotation mark for quoted strings   -->

On 11/30/2017 06:13 PM, Robert Nagle 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

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Robert Nagle
22118 FINCASTLE DR KATY TX 77450-1727
(Cell) 832-251-7522; (Skype) idiotprogrammer;  Carbon Neutral Since Jan 2010

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Ron Catterall
ron@catterall.net