On Wed, January 25, 2012 3:29 pm, Jim Adcock wrote:
I'm curious if anyone has any idea what percentage of submitted texts use "curlies" vs. just punting and going with ASCII-style "straights" ? My assumption has been that the great majority of submitted texts just use "straights."
I suspect that you are correct, and I further suspect that the decision is due in large part to the tools chosen. In my experience, it is like pulling teeth without anesthetic to get Abbyy to recognize curly quotes. I had do go in and define a new language explicitly removing " and ' from the allowed character set, and adding u+2018, u+2019, u+2021 and u+2022 to the set. When you do this, the spell checker doesn't recognize the words so delimited. To get curly quotes the best approach is probably to use a set of scripts like BB brags about and then smooth-read the resulting text to make sure the conversion was appropriate. Most editors also have a hard time dealing with curly quotes, so the conversion is one of the last things you would want to do. Most people probably don't want to make the effort, particularly when straight quotes are "good enough."