Change straight quotes to smart quotes (FM2022)

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

I've converted a 60,000+ manuscript from a plain text editor to FrameMaker. In the plain text document both the opening and closing quotation marks (around dialogue) use the " (double quotes). How can I convert them into the appropriate “ (smart opening quotation) and ” (smart closing quotation) respectively? 

Straight Quotes are turned off in my Preferences, so the smart quotes appear when I manually type them in the FM document (needless to say I'm not keen on doing this manually.)

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

Just use Search and Replace.

For the closing double-quote search for a straight double-quote and a space or punctuation mark and replace by a typographic double-quote and a space or punctuation mark. You can test with regular expressions. I do not have access to FrameMaker today, but you can try this:

Search for: "([ ,.:;!?])

Replace: typographic double-quote$1

It could be that you have to escape e.g. the dot with \. I would have to test this myself.

Then similar for the opening double-quote.

And of course there can be double-quotes for inch characters.

Please make a backup copy and test this very thoroughly, before you do a Change All!

Best regards, Winfried

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

I use the following expression in Find/Change. (Save before you run it!)

Find: 

"(.+?)"

Enable the Regular Expression radio button 

Change: 

\`$1\'

Note: FrameMaker will change the \` (backslash left apostrope) to an open curly quote and the \' (backslash right apostrope) to a close curly quote after by run the find/change. You can also just cut/paste the curly quotes into the change field. 

~Barb

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@Barb Binder to the rescue!

That worked like a charm - saved me from replacing 2839 straight quotes with smart quotes. 

Thanks!