Thanks to you and Ron for your ideas about how to deal with this issue. Wow, I didn't even know that the quote element even existed. Both solutions are interesting:
richard: I notice that QUOTE will surround the sentence with span tags and then presumably insert the language-appropriate version of quotes. Where does Docbook XSLT figure out the appropriate language? It looks like the default language is English, but if I have a passage where the language is different and uses different quotation marks, would the attribute xml:lang be sufficient? Robert On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Richard Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > [email protected] > > > > > On Nov 30, 2017, at 16:13, Robert Nagle <[email protected]> > 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 > > > > -- Robert Nagle 22118 FINCASTLE DR KATY TX 77450-1727 (Cell) 832-251-7522; (Skype) idiotprogrammer; Carbon Neutral Since Jan 2010
