UK to US quotes

[Michael38920888nc1i]

Ok, the question, I have a novel manuscript that was set in the UK.

It uses ' quotes instead of " quotes in it. Is there an easy way of changing them but not changing the contraction quotes??   can't should stay and not change to can"t when using the find/replace.

Any insight would be amazing.

[jmendesign]

The easy way in the find/change is to put a space before for “ in the beginning of word and a space after if you want to change to ”. But you also can do using Grep styles. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

We just had a topic like this, focusing on replacing "straight quotes" with typographer's quotes. It's both simple and convoluted.

A fairly complex GREP string, or sequence of them, could be crafted, but (especially as a one-shot project) you might try this ON A COPY of your working file —

• Search for space+opening single quote, replace with space+opening double quote.
• Search for paragraph-end+single quote, replace with paragraph return+opening double quote.
• Search for single quote+space, replace with double closing quote+space.
• Search for single quote+paragraph return, replace with double closing quote+paragraph return.

That should replace 99% of the quotation marks with the correct ones, without touching apostrophes.

If this is a frequent need, developing some GREP searches that are more sophisticated would be worthwhile. But honestly, I use this kind of sequential F/R all the time to clean up manuscripts done in wonky styles. If it's not an alla-time task, it's just as efficient as time spent developing some optimized approach. 🙂

[Peter Spier]

I'm not British, so I don't know the conventions for use of apostrophes for possessives ending in "s" but here in the US many style manuals call for "the Smiths' dog was running loose" and other similar cases where the last letter of the possesive word is an "s" to have just an apostrophe, no following letter, so you do need to proofread carefully.

Also, use of the space after as a trigger for the closing quote will not work in countries where convention is to put commas or periods outside the quotation...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All true. An all-in algorithm would be quite complex.

The possessive case could be resolved by GREPping for [word character][double quote][space][word character] — I think.

The conventions of non-English languages would have to be handled on a case by case basis., and even within English, punctuation outside a closing quote isn't unknown. Maybe the final proofreading step would be to F/R all single quotes green and all double quotes red, so that they stand out and a fairly speedy page scan would make most anomalies stand out.

Nothing really replaces wetware for a final acceptable result, here. 🙂

[Peter Spier]

The possessive case could be resolved by GREPping for [word character][double quote][space][word character] — I think.

By @James Gifford—NitroPress

I think not. Lots of cases where you might have a quoted word or phrase with a larger sentence.

As you said, no substitute for eyballs on this. I like your suggestion about coloring the quotes to make them easy to spot.