On 2/9/2013 08:10, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote:
On 02/09/2013 02:10 AM, Rory O'Farrell wrote:
On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:49:52 -0500
doug <dmcgarr...@optonline.net> wrote:
I have imported a relatively long document from an email, which contains
a lot of single and double quote marks,
all of them "inch marks"--straight lines. they need to be curly quotes
and apostrophes. While I could and did
change the preferences (in whatever drop-down menu I found it) to use
single and double curly quotes, it does
not automatically take place, and I dont' know how to do a search and
replace on them, since some double
quotes are opening quotes, and some are closing quotes. So even if I
manually change one and then use it as
a template for the s&r, how will it know what to do? And what about
apostrophes, in words like "can't?"
I had to do this some years ago for several book texts, so what I say
is subject to possibly faulty memory!
Normally a leading quote is the sequence <space quote> and a trailing
quote <quote space>, or sometimes <StartOfPara quote> <quote
EndofPara>. Ditto for single quotes, apart from the apostrophe. I
normally type a short line to generate sample curly quotes so I can
Copy and Paste these into the Replace box. My memory is that Find and
Replace in OOo 3.x did not accept characters direct from /Insert
/Special Characters, so I used this work around; this may have changed
in AOo 3.4.x.
I then was able to use a few Find and Replace sequences to change an
entire text. I think I actually used AltSearch in place of Find and
Replace for the last texts. I did have to check the texts for
anomalies - there were a few, but these were picked up quickly in a
proof-reading scan; I converted several book length texts in a matter
of a few minutes each.
If you decide to use this method, do please keep an unmodified backup,
as global Find and Replaces can quickly be disastrous until you get
the hang of them.
it may be possible to do all this with either a macro or Regular
Expressions. I have no great experience with either.
Step 1: Turn change tracking on.
Step 2: Do your magic to make the changes, what ever that may be.
Step 3: Review your changes, which would hopefully be rather quick.
You can probably do a safe search and replace by finding all spaces
followed by a " and replace with a space followed by a curl-to-the-right
double quote. You know, low hanging fruit and all. Same with " followed
by a space. Just looking for some short cuts if you wanted to use search
and replace.
After you do the bulk of the conversion, perhaps using some of the
preceding excellent advice, you might find my "QuoteChecker" macro of
use. It will catch stray "inch marks", and should detect unbalanced or
missing curly double quotes. (Sorry, no help for single quotes: with
exceptions like "'Twas the ..." and "'Course you can", the logic gets
very complex.) If you're interested, I'll clean up the macro and post it
on the wiki.
BTW, you can insert special characters into dialog fields (like s&r)
with Ctrl-Shift-S, to open the Special Characters dialog. The curly
quotes are up at U+2018, 19, 1B, and 1C.
HTH,
/tj/
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