smart (or curly) quotes

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danzac
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Joined: Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:45 am

smart (or curly) quotes

Post by danzac »

In Mellel preferences you can just click a checkbox to activate smart quotes. Can this be made a preference in Bookends as well?

The quotation marks specified in my format are not the problem, it is the imported material from a myriad of databases, they are almost always straight quotes (and apostrophes).

I understand I can do a find and replace, but doing that before every time I create a bibliography can get a little tedious.

Danny
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
Jon
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Post by Jon »

Hi Danny,

Bookends imports what is offered (as you saw). I don't have any plans to introduce automatic conversions between dumb/smart quotes/apostrophes/etc.

Jon
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danzac
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Post by danzac »

I can understand not wanting to start converting imported material, but could it perhaps be a chosen preference in the format to make all straight quotes/apostrophes curly?
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
ozean
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Post by ozean »

The solution that I would prefer is to solve this conversion in the interaction between Mellel and Bookends, i.e. change "generic" quotes to those that have been selected in Mellel. Already entered “curlyâ€
Last edited by ozean on Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Jon
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Post by Jon »

That's more reasonable, but I'm not sure the feature warrants adding more complexity to formatting than already exists.

Jon
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ozean
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Post by ozean »

That is of course a valid argument. However, changing the quotes in the Mellel document afterwards is a troublesome process – especially because the bibliography is such a fleeting entity and has to be added anew each time the references change.

Because of that, having the option to change generic quotes on import into Mellel would be a real time saver for those of us who have to send out copies of the document or its bibliography not only when the whole product is completely finished… :)
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Post by Jon »

Hi ozean,

Our posts crossed. My last reply was to Danny, actually. If you want a Mellel-specific feature, then I think this would best be implemented in Mellel as part of the API for citations/bibliographies. Mellel keeps very tight control over styles, and I think the smart quotes fall in that category.

Jon
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ozean
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Post by ozean »

Ah, ok. I think this has been discussed in the Mellel forums already – there has been a lengthy thread on the handling of quotes a while ago. If I have picked up what the Redlers say correctly, there seems to be some goodness in store regarding the management of bibliographies soon – perhaps they can throw this in too… (If they haven’t done so already.)
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