[docbook-apps] Automatic curly single quotes

[Giulio Piancastelli <gpian at softhome dot net>]

Hi all!

I found myself in need of placing the stylish curly single quote instead 
of the plain apostrophe between words (e.g. there's, I'll, and so on) 
while producing PDF output from my DocBook files. On the other hand, I 
did not want to directly type the Unicode entity (i.e. ’) in the 
DocBook sources, because of speed (it's just much quicker to put in the 
apostrophe while typing) and readability (I don't want my source files 
cluttered with strange entity codes in sentences) issues.

So, I came up with my personal solution. Since I'm using Ant to build 
PDF output from DocBook sources, I decided to put in an additional step 
in the build process which consists in substituting apostrophes between 
words with single curly quotes through a regular expression by means of 
the <replaceregexp> optional Ant task.

It seems to work well, but I'm just curious, wondering if anyone on the 
list have ever had this kind of problem, and what solution he or she 
came up with. Maybe there are more flexible and unobtrusive ideas I 
didn't think of. Would you mind to share your solutions?

Best Regards,
Giulio Piancastelli.


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