Now I'm feeling guilty for destroying your smart quotes. [Smile] I think we started doing that because they displayed as funky symbols in ... heh, can't remember now where the funkiness was spotted but definitely remember seeing it. Have to admit I haven't seen many funky characters lately.
That's just the thing, Lauren, in plain-text view, the plain quotes look better. The slanted ones are too thin when viewing the file in a browser. IMHO
I bet a good search/replace routine could get the curly quotes back -- (space)" = opening, "(space) or "(punctuation) = closing, etc. Or it could be a nightmare.
I believe nightmare because of the ridiculous amount of edge cases. It starts with the beginning of the line, continues with the subject of m-dashes, then there's quoting inside a quote block. And what do you do with the apostrophe vs. regular single quotes. I *think*, writing a parser that counts quotes is the safer choice. At least then you don't have to put everything into one search&replace. I once reverse engineered punctuation using a set of regexes. Got about 95% of the stuff right. Because 80% followed a simple scheme and I used a diff-tool to find obvious flaws. But maybe I'm too much of a worry-wart and natural language in fiction is much uniformer than that
But hey, I could always try to copy/paste to AbiWord. Maybe the formatting survives the clipboard. But to be honest, for the extraction of simple text suited for novels, an XSLT might be the much funner choice. Then I could just build a small application where I just drag&drop a docx and get the UBB formatted result... And it's reusable.
Michael, who now has to deal with a rampant nerd-muse in addition to his comatose fic-muse. And Nerd, well, he thinks Muse looks cute with her little wings and all and now I have to keep him from waking her and distracting her into the nfic side of things.
*arg* Muses...
