Slang & Apostrophe Usage

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    • #34167
      Sheri G
      Member

      I am working on a fiction manuscript where one of the characters uses a lot of slang (’em instead of them, for example). The problem is that InDesign makes the apostrophe in front of ’em curve the wrong way, so that the curve faces the word, instead of curving left, away from the word. Other than doing a painful, totally manual search and replace so I can replace only these select apostrophes with the correct glyph, is there an easier way to do this?

      I have Blatner Tools installed, but I didn’t see anything in there that would help identify these usages.

      I appreciate any ideas that will help me clean up this mess as quickly and painlessly as possible.

      Thanks!

      Sheri

    • #34175

      Is ’em the only single ‘uns, or are you mixing them with ‘actual’ single quotes as well?

      But ‘twould be too easy, I guess, if your “actual” quoting quotes were all double — then all one’d need is look for “space apostrophe” (to avoid “can’t”, “shan’t”, and “wan’t” (yes: the latter I actually encountered)).

    • #34181
      Sheri G
      Member

      Yes, unfortunately there is a lot of variety in the slang terminology. And, because it’s a novel filled with lots of dialogue, there are sets of apostrophes within quotes — and these, of course, should be right-facing/left-facing sets. So unless there’s some kind of Grep magic out there can count sets of apostrophes, there doesn’t seem to be a fast work-around.

      I guess I’ll just have to do a manual search for space-apostrophe through the entire manuscript and look at each one to see if I need to reverse it. What a stinky way to spend the day…

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