Straight quotes to smart quotes

[Woodpig]

Hi,

In Affinity Publisher I've imported the text of a Word doc, and all single and double quotes are straight, not smart. When I go to find and replace, the search cannot distinguish between opening and closing quotes - so FaR will replace everything with left (or right), but not both. Is there a way around this?

Thanks,

Gareth.

[Old Bruce]

If you search for a space then " and you should find all opening quotes. Search for " and then a space and you should find all closing quotes.

Find:

\s"   is for space then ".

"\s   is for " then space.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Woodpig said:

Is there a way around this?

Only by careful construction of the Find strings, and multiple operations, and then careful inspection/review and manual fixup of errors at the end.

So, for example:

• x'y where x and y are letters means the ' should be an apostrophe.
• x.' followed by a space usually means the ' is an ending single quote (and similarly for x." and similarly for ? or !)
• space followed by " is usually an opening quote mark and " followed by space is usually a closing quote (as mentioned by @Old Bruce)
• etc.  (I may have a more complete list somewhere that I can try to find)

It is error-prone, especially if the input text has any errors. But it can sometimes be fine-tuned based on intended and known usage patterns within the input text.

[Woodpig]

Thank you, both. That's a bit of a pain! I've just realised that I can actually change to smart quotes within Vellum, and then export a Word doc from there. I'm surprised that neither Affinity nor Mac Pages can do this.

[_Th]

In Word (PC, at least), find/replace for both single and double quotes will replace both types of straight quotes with the appropriate smart/curly quotes. (Assuming the spacing before/after each is correct.) If I remember correctly InDesign find/replace does the exact same thing.

Would be extremely helpful if all Affinity apps would do the same.

As often comes from my Department of Redundancy Department soapbox, it’s all about the workflow: Professional apps must understand the professional’s workflow and streamline it as much as possible. Every point of friction reduces user satisfaction, which of course hurts sales and industry adoption.

[David in Яuislip]

Pretty straightforward, using regex
"(?=(?:(?:[^"]*"){2})*[^"]*"[^"]*$)
will find leading straight quotes so put that in the find box
Make a dummy word like "dummy" with smart quotes, copy the opening quote into the Replace box and click replace all

Now put a straight quote into the find box, copy the closing quote from dummy" into the Replace box and click replace all 

I wish I'd thought of this but it's here
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71029975/regex-to-replace-regular-quotes-with-curly-quotes