Autoquote2

I have changed the logic of the original, Autoquote.py, so that it is much simpler, and therefore probably easier to tweak to your needs. Here is the basic process for each kind of typographic quotation:


 * I have created a couple of flags, doublequote_flag and singlequote_flag, which merely denote whether you are outside or inside a set of quotation marks.
 * If you are outside, the next quote is a leading quote, if inside, the next is a following quote. Since the single and double flags are separate, nested quotes are possible, but only one layer. In other words, for example, you will not get a good result if you put double quotes inside single quotes inside double quotes. I think this is an unlikely occurrence, and suggests you're overusing quotes.
 * There is also the addition of an apostrophe, for contractions like don't or d'etat. The apostrophe is a single follow quote – there is an alternative built in by commenting out one line and uncommenting the next to stay with a typewriter single quote. The test is whether the previous and next character are both alphanumeric.

Notes
 * Something not handled is a contraction like  'twas or  'tween. Also not handled at this time is the single guillemet, if this is used in nested quotes, the script can be modified. It's not clear to me how useful single guillemets are in French on a practical level, so the script uses English-style single quotes for now. There is a complexity with French that might require 'fr1' and fr2' choices, but one option seems to be double guillemets inside double guillemets, which would require a different approach.


 * In French, a non-breaking space is added after the leading double guillemets and before following double guillemets. Adding these spaces causes a counting problem in the number of characters in the frame, and may lead to a failure to get to the last character, in case that is a quotation mark. The work-around, if you see this is to run the script again on the same frame, and set the flag to inside as shown below – you should have gotten a message that the script ended with the flag inside for one kind of quote.


 * You should check the font for the typographical quotes after they are inserted to make sure they make the font of the frame originally. It took quite a bit of experimentation such as changing the default font for text frames in Preferences and in Document Setup (neither worked), but finally here is how to anticipate this: the inserted typographic quotes will have the font of the Default Paragraph Style, so simply check that and change if necessary before you run the script.

An Option
Some languages, French and Russian for example, may use the same typographic quotes for both layers. Here is a variation for this situation. Note that Russian does not typically put a space between the double guillemets and its internal text. elif (lang == 'ru2'): # this variant will use double guillemets for both layers of nested quotes lead_double = u"\u00ab" follow_double = u"\u00bb" lead_single = u"\u00ab" follow_single = u"\u00bb" You would still need to use a single quote inside (perhaps there will be another solution later).

Пушкин писал Дельвигу: "Жду 'Цыганов' и тотчас тисну".

becomes:

Пушкин писал Дельвигу: «Жду «Цыганов» и тотчас тисну».

(Quote borrowed from Wikipedia – see link above)

Autoquote3.py
Here is another variant of the script. It was mentioned to me that in some languages such as Russian, one may want to use only double guillemets for the nested quotations. So with a little added logic, and the expansion of the doublequote_flag to have values of outside, inside, and insideinside, this is now possible. If it isn't clear what this means, look at the following examples (sorry for the fact they're not in Russian and French).



Here we have used only typewriter double quotes even though butter is nested inside the outer quotes. Next we run the script, and choose 'ru' for the language, and we get:



Or the French style here, and of course, because of the added spaces we needed to run the script a second time, specifying 'inside' for the Beginning Double Quote State (see above) to capture that last double guillemet at the end.



This creates another potential issue, in that this could easily end up with two sets of guillemets in a row, which typically seem to be contracted to one. The answer might come from a separate script looking for these side by side twin guillemets and eliminating them, or not inserting the second as the script runs. It should be mentioned that one failing this script will have is when there might be two leading double quotes side by side, since the test for making a second leading double quote relies on there being a space in front of the second one.

If there is an advantage of these various options, it allows for getting text material from various sources, where the typist may have used different characters as substitutes for the actual typographic glyphs.