Automatically inserting quotation marks and dashes

One disadvantage of using a simple text editor to produce HTML is that
it is relatively time-consuming to put in the proper typographical
quotation marks and dashes.

A round tuit having arrived on my desk, I've produced a couple of sed
scripts to automatically convert the 'typewriter' equivalents:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

I've tested them fairly thoroughly, but I'd be grateful if a few other
people could give them a try to see if there are any overlooked flaws
(other than those I mention under 'restrictions').

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

Stephen Poley wrote:

...

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

something odd - when scrolling to the foot of the page in ie6, the content
disapears. ok in Moz

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

Stephen Poley wrote:

A round tuit having arrived on my desk, I've produced a couple of sed
scripts to automatically convert the 'typewriter' equivalents:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

I've tested them fairly thoroughly, but I'd be grateful if a few other
people could give them a try to see if there are any overlooked flaws
(other than those I mention under 'restrictions').

Can't find that round tuit on my desk so I only tested it on a couple of
documents, but it worked well for me.

Suggestion: add a URL, copyright, and usage info to the comments. They
will be valuable in a few months or years.

Andrew Graham

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 14:58:36 +0100, "William Tasso" <ngx (AT) tbdata (DOT) com>
wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:
...

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html


something odd - when scrolling to the foot of the page in ie6, the content
disapears. ok in Moz

That seems to be an intermittent bug in IE6. I see it occasionally when
checking my pages in IE, but only on a few pages, not always the same
pages, and the next time I start up it's gone away again.

If anyone can identify any consistent feature, I'd be grateful.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

On Thu, 04 Sep 2003 15:51:26 GMT, Brian
<usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:
One disadvantage of using a simple text editor to produce HTML is that
it is relatively time-consuming to put in the proper typographical
quotation marks and dashes.

The m-dash is an advantage. But I don't see the advantage of the
n-dash over the hyphen, nor "proper typographical quotation marks"
over, well, over the quote marks I used in this paragraph. May I ask
why you think it is important?

It's up to every author to decide for themselves whether it is
important, of course. But if you look at books and magazines, you will
find that almost all of them do use these characters (em-dash seems to
be preferred in America, with space/en-dash/space being often used in
Europe).

The use of hyphens for dashes, and the use of "these" quote marks was
something originally imposed by the use of typewriters. I expect that
quite a lot of people who want a good-looking site would prefer to use
the proper characters.

The page says it does not handle attributes that span a line break.
I'm assuming you mean something like

img title="this photo was taken from
the left bank" src="paris.jpg" alt="Notre Dame Cathedral"

and not
img title="this photo was taken from the left bank"
src="paris.jpg" alt="Notre Dame Cathedral"

That is indeed what I mean: the scripts should handle the latter case
correctly. I'll see if I can clarify that.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

On Thu, 04 Sep 2003 17:43:05 GMT, "Andrew Graham"
<andrewgraham.at.att.net (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid> wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:
A round tuit having arrived on my desk, I've produced a couple of sed
scripts to automatically convert the 'typewriter' equivalents:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

I've tested them fairly thoroughly, but I'd be grateful if a few other
people could give them a try to see if there are any overlooked flaws
(other than those I mention under 'restrictions').

Can't find that round tuit on my desk so I only tested it on a couple of
documents, but it worked well for me.

Thanks.

Suggestion: add a URL, copyright, and usage info to the comments. They
will be valuable in a few months or years.

That's a good suggestion. Will do.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

Stephen Poley wrote:

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 14:58:36 +0100, "William Tasso" <ngx (AT) tbdata (DOT) com
wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:
...

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html


something odd - when scrolling to the foot of the page in ie6, the
content disapears. ok in Moz

That seems to be an intermittent bug in IE6. I see it occasionally
when checking my pages in IE, but only on a few pages, not always the
same pages, and the next time I start up it's gone away again.

If anyone can identify any consistent feature, I'd be grateful.

memory leak? page behaves fine now, but I've rebooted since last I checked
by.

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

William Tasso wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

something odd - when scrolling to the foot of the page in ie6, the
content disapears. ok in Moz

Works fine in _my_ IE6. Often enough, when I've had weird problems
(especiall cross-browser problems), I've found non-validating HTML to be the
cause. But that doesn't seem to be your problem; your URL validates just
fine:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...er_quotes.html
--
Petter Hesselberg
http://petterhesselberg.com/