[Solved] Replacing Quotation marks?

[Dave Combattelli]

Hi Folks,

This quotation mark thing has my head done in, I've read so much about it and still can't get it to work on ooo writer 2.4

Here's the problem. I was a manuscript with a lot of "" Straight quote marks. I would like to change them to “Quotation” curly quotation marks and visa versa too if need be.

I have gone to tools - auto correct and click the boxes etc and I can change to that when I type a quotation mark it can be either straight or curly. Which is fine, but I want to change all the previous Quotation marks.

I have also followed the open wiki about inserting special character then Format, Auto format and Apply. It does nothing

Is what I want possible?

If Yes, How do I do it?

I am told it's possible on Word and on Mac, surely it must be true here too?

[TerryE]

How about using replace with regular expressions? For example \>" => ”, etc.
You may also need to pick up the punctuation cases "Like this!" but bulk regular expression substitutes for \>","\<, and normal substitutes for ?", ." should get 95%. Then all you need to do is search for any residual " and do them manually.

Not perfect but at least this should reduce the manual exercise by at least an order of magnitude.

[Dave Combattelli]

Thanks for the reply terry. But I am sorry I don't follow you at all?

I tried putting "\< into find and it came up with nothing?

Grah, and now someone just told me it is easy to do on word??!!! Surely there's an option somewhere in Writer????

[Villeroy]

It's so easy. Fire up Word and do whatever your frieds tell you to do. Never use any other software than everybody else. It could be that it provides 200 options when you need 201.

[Dave Combattelli]

I did, its the replace straight quotations with curly quotations in Tools - Auto correct.

Nothing happens in Writer?!! So I presume I am doing something wrong? Question is I don't know as what ever I have tried is not doing a thing!

[AndrewZ]

I did, its the replace straight quotations with curly quotations in Tools - Auto correct.

That only affects new typing. To change the old text, try the regular expression in "Example regular expressions for Writer".

I tried putting "\< into find and it came up with nothing?

Did you check the box for regular expressions?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I have also followed the open wiki about inserting special character then Format, Auto format and Apply. It does nothing

Autoformat apply works only on the Default paragraph style to replace straight quotes with smart quotes.

If you're document is formatted with only a few different styles, you can take this route:

• Find all Body Text (Find styles, Find All)
• Apply Default style
• Format, Autoformat, Apply
• Reapply the Body Text style
• Repeat for other styles

Don't ask why, but this is the only way that Autoformat, Apply seems to work.

[Dave Combattelli]

Did you check the box for regular expressions?

Nope! And that solved the problem!!

Thanks very much for saving me a headache and several hours or days doing it the other way.

I am still sure there must be another way to do this though!

[Dave Combattelli]

* Find all Body Text (Find styles, Find All)
* Apply Default style
* Format, Autoformat, Apply
* Reapply the Body Text style
* Repeat for other styles

Tried that.... it did something as the progress bar went hyper for 20 seconds. All straight quotes stayed the same

[Villeroy]

This works for me:
Find&Replace by regular expressions
Search: "\<(.+)\>" (straight quotes)
Replace with: “$1" (curly quotes)

Search expression is a quote followed by the start of a word \< followed by at least one element of any char .+, the end of a word \> and a quote. The dot in .+ stands for "any single char", the plus stands for "at least one of the preceeding".
Replace expression is a leading quote, followed by what has been matched in the first pair of braces (.+), followed by a trailing quote.

[Dave Combattelli]

Many thanks for all the help folks, the suggested find and replace comments is what I will use.

ooo is great and I have been using it for years. But really I think the ooo developers need to work more on issues on ease of usability for the general public. Using commands like .>$/ and so has most people running for the hills, or at least a counterfeit copy of Word. Ubuntu proved this with it's user friendly Linux, though not perfect at least new users don't run so fast. Unfortunately ooo 3 beta looks like Lotus word pro 97, with little done in writer. Shame.

Thanks again for all the help, much appreciated.

[TerryE]

In the spirit of fairness, the main improvement of usability in Word vs Writer here is that Word applies the smart quotes algorithm to any text in a replace output, so replacing " for " achieves the smart quoting throughout. Writer only applies smart quotes to typed text, hence the need to use patterns.

Is it worth changing Writer to enable auto correction to apply to replace output. I'm not sure on that one. I would prefer to improve the help on using regular expressions.

[sybille]

Here's a macro that you can use to change all straight quotes to curly quotes. It doesn't work in the other direction, but I haven't found much of a need for that myself. I tend to write the sort of text that needs straight quotes in a text editor that uses them by default.

Macro source: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=58604

Code: Select all

rem **********************************************************************
rem TYPOGRAPHIC QUOTES
rem **********************************************************************

rem   ---- this macro changes dumb quotes to curlies regardless of styles
rem   ---- (unlike OOo's in-built "Autoformat" function)

Sub TypographicQuotes
   oDoc = thisComponent
      ' character codes used in this macro
      ' Chr(34)   double quote
      ' Chr(39)   single quote
      ' Chr(8216)   single quote left
      ' Chr(8217)   single quote right
      ' Chr(8220)   double quote left
      ' Chr(8221)   double quote right
   aFind = Array(""+_
      Chr(34)+"\<",_
      Chr(34),_
      Chr(39)+"\<",_
      Chr(39),_
      "[0-9A-Za-zÀ-Ö\x00D8-\x00F6\x00F8-\x021B\x1E80-\x1EF3\xF730-\xF739\xFB00-\xFB06]\>"+Chr(8216)+"\<",_
      Chr(8216)+"OOoRegExSucks"_
      )
      ' The line beginning "[0-9 and ending +"\<",_ should be on one line.
      ' It's a workaround for OOo's lack of substring matching in RegEx when using find/replace.
      ' It appends a temporary tag to left single quotes when following words or numbers
      ' To avoid another bug/limitation, characters allowed at word-ends are defined in hex ranges
      ' (includes all Latin characters you're ever likely to need, plus the Unicode range for hanging/oldstyle figures)
   aReplace = Array(""+_
      Chr(8220),_
      Chr(8221),_
      Chr(8216),_
      Chr(8217),_
      "&OOoRegExSucks",_
      Chr(8217)_
      )
   aRayCount = 0
   FandR = oDoc.createReplaceDescriptor
   FandR.SearchCaseSensitive = true
   FandR.SearchRegularExpression = true
   While aRayCount <= uBound(aFind)
      FandR.setSearchString(aFind(aRayCount))
      FandR.setReplaceString(aReplace(aRayCount))
      aRayCount = aRayCount + 1
      oDoc.ReplaceAll(FandR)
   Wend
End Sub

[floris v]

Is it worth changing Writer to enable auto correction to apply to replace output. I'm not sure on that one. I would prefer to improve the help on using regular expressions.

I think that it is worth it. It makes life easier for a lot of people who then won't have to use regexp so much. There are also lots of people who can help people with finding the correct regexp. I'd prefer the developers to make the regexp (and the rest of OOo) less buggy.

[defman]

Here's a macro that you can use to change all straight quotes to curly quotes. It doesn't work in the other direction, but I haven't found much of a need for that myself. I tend to write the sort of text that needs straight quotes in a text editor that uses them by default.

Macro source: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=58604

Code: Select all

rem **********************************************************************
rem TYPOGRAPHIC QUOTES
rem **********************************************************************

rem   ---- this macro changes dumb quotes to curlies regardless of styles
rem   ---- (unlike OOo's in-built "Autoformat" function)

Sub TypographicQuotes
   oDoc = thisComponent
      ' character codes used in this macro
      ' Chr(34)   double quote
      ' Chr(39)   single quote
      ' Chr(8216)   single quote left
      ' Chr(8217)   single quote right
      ' Chr(8220)   double quote left
      ' Chr(8221)   double quote right
   aFind = Array(""+_
      Chr(34)+"\<",_
      Chr(34),_
      Chr(39)+"\<",_
      Chr(39),_
      "[0-9A-Za-zÀ-Ö\x00D8-\x00F6\x00F8-\x021B\x1E80-\x1EF3\xF730-\xF739\xFB00-\xFB06]\>"+Chr(8216)+"\<",_
      Chr(8216)+"OOoRegExSucks"_
      )
      ' The line beginning "[0-9 and ending +"\<",_ should be on one line.
      ' It's a workaround for OOo's lack of substring matching in RegEx when using find/replace.
      ' It appends a temporary tag to left single quotes when following words or numbers
      ' To avoid another bug/limitation, characters allowed at word-ends are defined in hex ranges
      ' (includes all Latin characters you're ever likely to need, plus the Unicode range for hanging/oldstyle figures)
   aReplace = Array(""+_
      Chr(8220),_
      Chr(8221),_
      Chr(8216),_
      Chr(8217),_
      "&OOoRegExSucks",_
      Chr(8217)_
      )
   aRayCount = 0
   FandR = oDoc.createReplaceDescriptor
   FandR.SearchCaseSensitive = true
   FandR.SearchRegularExpression = true
   While aRayCount <= uBound(aFind)
      FandR.setSearchString(aFind(aRayCount))
      FandR.setReplaceString(aReplace(aRayCount))
      aRayCount = aRayCount + 1
      oDoc.ReplaceAll(FandR)
   Wend
End Sub

Many thanks! This is just what I was looking for! What kind of font is the curlies from?

I am using David.ttf, version 5.02, which I liked very much but the quotes was abysmal, and the question mark, and exclamation marks are too small. I'm wondering how to replace those as well, same way with the quotes?

Many thanks in advance,