[Scribus] Stupid N00b Question

[Craig Ringer]

Adrianna Pinska wrote:

>On 7/4/05, John Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>I found a place on the wiki where it speaks of true quote marks. I
>>have been doing DTP for years, and know exactly what they are
>>and when to use them. What I can't figure out is how to get Scribus
>>to use them automatically. Hitting F12 and entering a code is so
>>last century. Surely there's a setting somewhere?
>>    
>>
>
>When I typeset a magazine in Scribus (1.2) a few months ago, I wrote a
>search-and-replace awk script which I ran on all the text files before
>I put them into Scribus.  They replaced all the quotes, n- and
>m-dashes and ellipsis, and possibly also did some clean-up like
>removing double spacing.  There is almost certainly a way to write a
>script to do the replacement inside Scribus as well, using Python; I
>haven't tried that yet.
>
That's a good idea. With some PyQt work I think it should even be 
possible to do as-you-type quote conversion etc. That'd be a really 
interesting project. I'm not sure I'll have the time to do it currently, 
but if someone is interested I'd be glad to help them along.

Automatic quote conversion is more difficult than it sounds, 
unfortunately, and it's possible it may just need to be done by Scribus 
its self. You have to handle things like

?quotes? (French, IIRC)
?quotes? (I think that's right ... might be the other way around)

plus quoting like:

?blah blah blah blah

?blah blah blah blah

?blah blah.?

It can be done of course, it just requires some clever stateful rules. 
Probably a fun project. I'd start with a batch quote converter - you 
could probably prototype that with Python if you preferred - then work 
on supporting as-you-type.

This reminds me ... I think we need access to the text filter's smarts 
in the regular S&R dialogs.

--
Craig Ringer