Sorry to be late replying, but Michael's last post sent me scurrying around to wikipedia, w3schools, php.net, and down the rabbit hole. Is it still 2010?
Michael wrote:
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.
I agree they look better in plain text, though with a proportional font they'd look nice.
Doranwen wrote:
I prefer the straight quotes over the curly ones
OK, straight quotes wins.
Michael wrote:
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
I think I understood about half of that.
Regexes? Reverse-engineered punctuation? Great shades of Elvis!
Hey, you use what ya got! AbiWord is my hammer. One of 'em, anyway.
Word 2007 for its change tracking and wonderful spellchecker with auto-correct option/ Of course, HTML-export [Help] But hey, I could always try to copy/paste to AbiWord. Maybe the formatting survives the clipboard.
I was thinking more like save to doc from Word, open in AbiWord, save to simplest HTML, open HTML in text editor and search/replace i's in angle brackets for i's in braces...
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.
... well sure, if you want to get all high-tech and super-efficient about it. :p Seriously, Michael, I'm in awe of your mad skills.
Lauren
