gosh i love a merry-go-round... :+( *** here's a few notes, repeated too many times already, but whatchagonnado? if this doesn't make sense to you, that's probably because it wasn't intended for you, so pay no mind. *** any heavy bracket markup like [i]italics[/i] is obtrusive, and that's why proofers complain about it, justifiably... use light markup, like _italics_, and they won't complain. better yet, have them do the proofing with an .html field -- using a text-area field only when editing is required -- and you can use _real_ italics (and highlight it with color). you can also use _color_ to flag your questionable words, which makes the flagging a whole lot harder to "miss"... *** spacey double-quotes are _easy_ to solve if you pay heed to the _paragraphs_. ergo... pay heed to the paragraphs! yes, paragraphs cross page-boundaries... but so what? you start with the first file, and keep track of paragraphs while you proceed to the second, and the third, and so on. there's a ton of redundancy in the quotes -- open, close, open, close, open, close. make use of that redundancy... it's not rocket-science; it's not even difficult programming. get over the mind-blockage you have on this topic. *** and once you _do_ get over that mind-blockage, you just might see that books that use _single-quotes_ for dialog aren't really all that different. "but", you are sputtering, "yes they are, because contractions cause big difficulties!" poppycock. here's a file with a list of contractions (among other stuff):
that file's been up since june of 2007. use that list intelligently to control those contractions... possessives also use the single-quote, but they're easy to deal with as well; just do a little thinking about them. don't give up so easily. _try._ you'll find it's not as hard as you thought. and if you actually honestly _try_, and hit a wall anyway, show me your actual honest efforts, and i will help you... *** "probable markup on this page"? are you purposely trying to be vague? how about listing the italicized words, _specifically_? geez! -bowerbird