Affinity Publisher: Managing mismatched typographic pairs

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

I'm faced with a situation where an initial text contains 1,279 opening inverted commas (“) and 1,238 closing inverted commas (”). Would you know how to quickly and effectively identify the mismatched inverted commas to solve this problem in the best possible way?

Thank you in advance for your expert advice.

[MikeTO]

You should be able to do it with GREP (here's an ID example: https://www.reddit.com/r/indesign/comments/urqld4/grep_for_finding_an_open_quotation_mark_with_no/) but when I'm fixing stuff like this I don't like to think too hard and just do it the brute force way:

1. Copy the text to any other app such as a text editor or MS Word
2. Copy half of it to a new document and use Find to count the opening and closing quotes
   1. If they are balanced, close that document because that half is okay
   2. If they are unbalanced, copy half of of it to a new document

Eventually, you'll have eliminated most of the text which has only balanced quotes and identify the handful of cases with unbalanced quotes. You could probably do this in five minutes.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Pyanepsion]

When preparing the DTP for the American translation of a French hit, errors appeared during the conversion of dialogues: in French, lines begin with a dash and end with the paragraph, whereas in English they are enclosed in quotation marks without paragraph constraints. The dichotomous search was not appropriate here, as a balance of errors in one part of the text makes them invisible. For example, a sequence like ‘open, open, close, open, close, close’ would not be detected.

The Regex identified two additional errors. I eventually automated the coloring of the quotation marks and the text between them. In the end, it took two days to create this routine and correct the quotation marks.

🟩 It would be useful if the Affinity suite could automatically detect elements of a pair without their counterparts, such as quotation marks, brackets, braces, parentheses, or hyphens. For example, an opening quotation mark should not follow another unclosed opening mark, and a closing quotation mark should not appear after another closing mark. Additionally, the search for the corresponding element could be confined to within the chapter.

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

For example, an opening quotation mark should not follow another unclosed opening mark

You can detect that with regular expressions if you know you want to look for it. 

But while that may be true for quotation marks, it is not generally true for brackets, braces, and parentheses can be properly nested (Open, Open, Close, Close).

[walt.farrell]

Also, in English, quotation marks can be nested which can complicate detection/matching. Open ", open ', open ", close ", close ', close " could be valid for example. 

That makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to devise a general scheme that would work for all texts, even without considering the difficulty of different rules for different languages.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Pyanepsion]

37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to devise a general scheme that would work for all texts, even without considering the difficulty of different rules for different languages.

Yes, although there are many similarities.

In French :

Parentheses can be closing only in some contexts, as with enumerations, including some title levels. For example:
      

2) The level 3 title.

    Semi-cadratine hyphens, used for incisive clauses, work in pairs. However, the second element may be replaced by a full stop (., ?, !), but in practice this hyphen never poses a concordance problem. For example :
 

blablabla – albalbalb – blablabla.
blablabla – albalbalb.

Braces, quotes (whether computer, English, French, etc.) always work in pairs.

It is also important to note that an element in a pair can never be found in another chapter, or even after a page break.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Pyanepsion said:

It would be useful if the Affinity suite could automatically detect elements of a pair without their counterparts, such as quotation marks, brackets, braces, parentheses, or hyphens. For example, an opening quotation mark should not follow another unclosed opening mark, and a closing quotation mark should not appear after another closing mark. Additionally, the search for the corresponding element could be confined to within the chapter.

Just FYI, in some English books it's okay to have two opening double quotation marks without a closing one in between, as long as they're both at the start of successive paragraphs. An automated feature would need to be a bit smarter about this.

[Pyanepsion]

58 minutes ago, lacerto said:

These kinds of texts can get absurdly complex to deal with any kind of automation

No. You just have to want to do it, and it's of obvious interest to all those who have to process the texts. I haven't gone any further, but you can already see that errors are immediately visually easier to detect, so image a routine that immediately tells you where the errors are.

14 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Just FYI, in some English books it's okay to have two opening double quotation marks without a closing one in between, as long as they're both at the start of successive paragraphs. An automated feature would need to be a bit smarter about this.

This also existed in French during the transition period to en dashes.

 

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Old Bruce]

30 minutes ago, lacerto said:

These kinds of texts can get absurdly complex to deal with any kind of automation, especially in English language where things can be complicated by ambiguous use (like minute and second glyphs accidentally curled instead of keeping them straight, or simply by contractions like can't etc.),

Here is a bit of "The Red Headed League" a Sherlock Holmes story. It has dialog quoted by Dr. Watson from Sherlock, his client Jabez Wilson who is telling Sherlock and Watson what he said and quoting his assistant as well as the head of the Red Headed League.

red head league.txt

I have coloured the opening double and single quotes and also the closing single and double quotes here in this Publisher document.

SH and JW dialog.afpub

I think there are a some contractions and possessive apostrophes as well.

For this sort of work you need a very good copy editor, a person, not a piece of software.

[walt.farrell]

55 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

in some English books it's okay to have two opening double quotation marks without a closing one in between, as long as they're both at the start of successive paragraphs.

I know it's OK in both modern and older US and UK English texts, when the same person is speaking for multiple paragraphs. 

I'm curious when it's not OK.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Pyanepsion]

@lacerto

In my humble opinion, it is essential to differentiate between the resolution of a specific case, designed to respond to a particular situation, and that of a company which aims to create sustainable solutions for a wide audience, by generalising the concept. The first question to ask is to precisely define the potential target, and then identify the resources and skills needed to achieve this objective.

How many times have I heard that certain tasks were humanly impossible to achieve, only to see those same tasks successfully accomplished? You have, for example, found a solution by placing vowels at the beginning or end of a line, even though, unless I'm mistaken, this is not recommended in Finnish. For my part, I've automated the colouring of delimiters and their content to make it easier to detect missing elements. However, this only reduces the time needed for the review.

I think it would be a good idea to continue the analysis to allow the software to report only the isolated or forgotten delimiter. So, yes, I firmly believe that more advanced automation is possible. The main obstacle will be wanting it. As for the market, it seems vast.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Old Bruce]

4 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

...  I firmly believe that more advanced automation is possible. ...

While this has nothing to do with quotes, consider that there are style guides some of which eschew the use of the Oxford comma and others which require its use. And I am sure that we have all had automatic spill chucking fail. There is a point where the automation can cause problems.  

[MikeTO]

45 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I know it's OK in both modern and older US and UK English texts, when the same person is speaking for multiple paragraphs. 

I'm curious when it's not OK.

Just when it's a simple mistake like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. <Left quote>I forgot to add a closing quotation mark for this quotation. Lorem ipsum blah blah blah. <Left quote>But this time I remembered.<Right quote>

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Just FYI, in some English books it's okay to have two opening double quotation marks without a closing one in between, as long as they're both at the start of successive paragraphs.

FWIW, in some of the novels I have read, if it is the same speaker in successive paragraphs, there is no paragraph closing quotation mark, but if in the next paragraph someone else begins speaking, the preceding paragraph gets the closing quote. It helps prevent confusion about who is saying what.

[Pyanepsion]

@Old Bruce 

I looked at your text. In France, we were still writing in this format just over a hundred years ago. It’s obviously a real typographic headache.

🟩 Managing punctuation pairs is a real headache these days, regardless of the language. A verification tool that understands these rules would be extremely useful.

⁂

For those who are interested…

The evolution of dialogue typography

The typographic evolution of dialogue in France is a subject that has fascinated me. It reflects cultural, linguistic, and technical developments, as well as the ongoing battle between English and French influences. Here’s an overview of the main stages and periods in the typographic evolution of dialogue in the French style (with a bit about the English style, which I’m less familiar with):

1. Medieval period (before the 15th century)

• Absence of distinctly typographed dialogue: In medieval manuscripts, dialogues were not differentiated from the rest of the text. They were integrated into the body of the text without any specific markings, sometimes using abbreviations or symbols to indicate changes in speakers.

2. Invention of printing (15th century)

• Birth of modern typography: With Gutenberg's invention of printing around 1450, dialogues began to be printed. However, they were still barely distinguishable from the rest of the text, often inserted without quotation marks or dashes. Dialogues might be indicated by paragraph changes or by capitalized initial letters.

3. 16th-17th centuries

• Appearance of quotation marks: During the 16th century, quotation marks began to appear in France, initially in the form of double commas at the bottom of a line to enclose quotations or dialogue. However, their use remained inconsistent.
• Use of dashes: From the 17th century onwards, dashes began to be used to indicate the beginning of lines in dialogue. This practice gradually became more common, particularly in the theater.

4. Eighteenth century

• Standardization of quotation marks: Quotation marks became increasingly common for framing dialogue, thanks in particular to the influence of the Académie française and Parisian printers. Quotation marks took on a more standardized form, at the top of the line (“…”), to indicate direct speech.
• More dashes: The use of dashes to introduce lines in dialogue became almost systematic, especially in literary works such as novels and plays.

5. 19th century

• Affirmation of the modern model: The 19th century saw the spread of the system we know today: dialogues were introduced by dashes or framed by quotation marks. Dashes were mostly used in novels to mark each new line, while quotation marks were used to frame specific sentences or passages.
• Typographic codification: Typographic practices became standardized thanks to advances in printing technology and efforts by publishing houses to establish precise typographical rules.

6. 20th century

• Clarification of typographic rules: The 20th century saw the definitive establishment of current standards for dialogue typography in France. French quotation marks (« … ») were preferred over English quotation marks (“…”), although the latter began to appear in certain contexts, particularly in the translation of foreign books.
• Typographic experiments: With the literary avant-garde (particularly the Nouveau Roman), some authors began to experiment with typography, playing with the presentation of dialogue (absence of dashes, use of italics, etc.) to create particular stylistic or narrative effects.

7. 21st century

• Diversification of practices: The advent of the typewriter and later computers introduced the use of straight quotation marks ("…"), which became widespread for convenience. Although modern software automatically corrects this issue in many cases, it is not infallible. For example, in the Affinity suite, text formatting in Publisher differs from that in Photo and Designer, where typographical errors linked to keyboard use are not always corrected, leading to inconsistencies.
• Anglo-Saxon influence: The influence of Anglo-Saxon standards, marked by the use of straight quotation marks and other typographic conventions, is becoming more pronounced among certain authors steeped in American literature. This trend forces French-language typographers to make tedious adjustments to bring texts in line with French conventions, which are simpler and more restrained.

⁂

Integrating a function capable of correctly managing typographical pairs of any kind would be a major asset for the Suite, particularly as it is software closely linked to writing.

📌 The example of programming tools such as Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, and PhpStorm, which are beginning to offer these features as part of the coding process, demonstrates the importance of such improvements. Adding such a feature to the Suite would not only be beneficial but essential to ensuring consistent, professional typography.