Feature Request: New Paste Special

[Hook]

I'm assuming what I'm looking for is a feature Textmaker doesn't have rather than a bug or my missing something.

I've just entered the editing phase of an anthology I've been putting together over the past 4 years. I discovered that, in only the last few stories, I had straight quotes instead of smart quotes. Which is very much a pain, changing every single set of quote marks in stories that have a good deal of dialog.

A little background. I draft my stories on devices that are set up for distraction free drafting, the transfer the text to Textmaker for editing. In this work, I took the unusual step of waiting until I had drafted all the stories to begin the editing cycle. What I realized is that, just before those last stories with the wrong quotes I switched drafting devices (actually I tried out several). The drafting device I have used since 2007 is an Alphasmart Neo 2. It has a rather unique way of transmitting text to Textmaker. I give it a USB printing cable and it types the text into Textmaker letter by letter, as if typing the words. Apparently, Textmaker is really fooled and uses auto-correct to convert all the quotes to smart quotes.

All the other digital typewriters I have used save the text to a simple text file and I copy and paste the text as unformatted text. The file is instantly formatted to the specifications of my style template and all is good... I assumed. But apparently, this doesn't include smart quote conversion.

Yes, obviously, I could go back to the Alphasmart Neo 2 (wonderful machine). But I'm wondering if there couldn't be a Paste Special that allowed the smart quote conversion to happen for large blocks of text. I know nothing about how easy what I am asking is after the fact. Or maybe there could be a separate smart quote "apply now" conversion function.

Or did I miss something that Textmaker already does?

[Jossi]

Even if this feature is missing, there is no need to change each quote mark separately. An opening quote mark is usually always preceded by a space or a praragraph mark. So you can use the replace function in TextMaker instead:

1st pass: replace Space" with Space“
2nd pass: replace Paragraph mark" with Paragraph mark“
3rd pass: replace " with ”

Choose "Replace all" and "Search from top".

This is normally sufficient. There are a few exceptions, for example if a document contains manual line breaks or if a quote begins immediately after an opening bracket, but these are very rare. If necessary, you would have to insert extra runs for this.

[Hook]

Even if this feature is missing, there is no need to change each quote mark separately. An opening quote mark is usually always preceded by a space or a praragraph mark. So you can use the replace function in TextMaker instead:

1st pass: replace Space" with Space“
2nd pass: replace Paragraph mark" with Paragraph mark“
3rd pass: replace " with ”

Choose "Replace all" and "Search from top".

This is normally sufficient. There are a few exceptions, for example if a document contains manual line breaks or if a quote begins immediately after an opening bracket, but these are very rare. If necessary, you would have to insert extra runs for this.

Thanks, Jossi. That worked much better than the version of that I came up with. One important thing to include in these instructions is that you can't just type the quote mark in the replacement box because the autocorrect doesn't function when you replace text. So you have to type ALt-0147 for open quote and Alt-0148 for close quote. I was thrown by discovering this and didn't think it through as I should have. I came up with a much clumsier and more time consuming version of this. Lol.

Thank you for sussing this out for me. An easy solution. I still wouldn't mind a more automated solution (autocorrect applying to pasted text as well as typing), but this will do.