Perhaps my post was misunderstood, because I'm not sure where the point of disagreement is. I never said that the process could be *totally* automated. Is your program that "does most of the work but ... can't do it all" reliably correcting less than 98 percent of the quotation marks and apostrophes in book-length texts? If so, perhaps additional fine-tuning is possible. Regards, Mark
It was stated:
In the vast majority of PG works, probably between 98 and 100 percent of quotation marks and apostrophes could be reliably corrected without the need for human eyeballing. I disagree. I have posted hundreds of books where straight quotes have been converted. This is my process:
First, run the text through a program, written in Perl. This does most of the hard work but it can't do it all. This will flag everything that it's not sure about. That will flag continued quoted paragraphs where the closing double-quote is missing. It will flag situations where, after the conversion, a set of rules have been broken, such as a closing double quote immediately followed by a letter, typically caused by triple-nested quotes. It has a built-in dictionary of rules for single quotes (i.e. a word ending in 's is going to be âs). It also has a built-in dictionary of known words, such as foâcâsle, which don't fall under the rules. But that's as far as it can go. It will leave behind unconverted single quotes typically at the start of a word. There are a handful of these in every book.
Verifying the paragraphs missing the closing double quote and resolving the opening single quotes on a word is a manual process. It takes only a few minutes and almost always shows other problems with the text as an added benefit. But it can never be totally and reliably automated based on my experience.
--Roger