At 09:38 24/06/2013 -0400, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote:
On 06/23/2013 12:08 AM, Brian Barker wrote:
At 22:20 22/06/2013 -0400, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote:
At 14:44 22/06/2013 -0400, Doug McGarrett wrote:
Now if OO and LO are so great, why can't they deal with curly
quotes and apostrophes in imported text? I have to go thru and
fix all the damned inch marks one by one by hand. WordPerfect can
do that automatically. Not only that, it can differentiate
between quote marks and real inch and foot designators. Let's see
your OO/LO do that!
I am not sure what this is since I have never had any particular
difficulty dealing with these things.... though I am not sure how
one can understand that a particular single quote is an "inch
mark" as opposed to a non-curly double quote.
I think the reference to an "inch mark" is simply a way of
identifying your (typewriter-style) "non-curly" double quote.
But Mr McGarrett does have a point, I think. OpenOffice Writer
will replace typed single and double quotes with what it calls
custom quotes quite efficiently as you type. But if you have
existing straight quotes in a document (perhaps in an inherited
document or in text pasted in from elsewhere), there appears to be
no easy way to apply that intelligence after the event. You could
replace a straight quote with a curly one, but you'd have to select
manually the individual cases where you needed open and close
quotes: you cannot at this stage invoke Writer's ability to use its
intelligence about this. In some other word processors (dare I
mention Microsoft Word if I promise to wash my mouth out?), you can
merely replace straight quotes with straight quotes: replacement is
treated the same way as typing, the same intelligence is invoked,
and curly quotes of the appropriate handedness are substituted en masse.
Oh, now I get it.... WP will auto-magically replace straight quotes
with curly quotes when you import a document. For most of what I do,
that would really mess things up for me.
I'm not sure that's true: it's certainly not so for Microsoft
Word. But if you replace straight quotes with the same thing in
Word, it will make the change then - so it is controllable.
I did have one document, however, where I desired that behavior, so
I wrote a macro to do it if I remember correctly; would have been
nice to have had a built-in command to do it for me already.
You'll have noticed, I hope, that I've anyway been corrected: you
*can* do this easily in Writer, using Format | AutoCorrect > | Apply.
Brian Barker
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