Template for converting Word’s typographer’s quotes to straight quotes in PSPad

4 May 2017 1 mins Markdown, PSPad, Text, Word

I write my posts in Word, mostly. Because Word, with its superb proofing tools, it single handedly the best tool for that. But I also use Markdown to store the posts and I publish from it, because Markdown is just a plain text. The finishing touches like code pasting and YAML editing I do in PSPad. Again, because it’s the editor I like and used since forever. However, I use typographer’s quotes in Word. Why wouldn’t it? And although I can leave these in the final text, I prefer to use straight quotes and let these be processed in Markdown to HTML transformation.

Fixing these is not difficult, but any (semi)manual work can and should be automated. Recently I decided to use conversion templates in PSPad. It’s there, declarative and I don’t need to manage anything else.

[Settings]
ForwardName=Word to Text
BackwardName=N/A

ForwardIgnoreCase=0
BackWardIgnoreCase=0

ConversionStyle=chars

[Chars]
8217=39
8220=34
8221=34
8211=45

The conversion table is just three (quotes only) lines in the [Chars] section. Rest is just a boilerplate. Besides the quotes I’m also fixing the dash character (last line).

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.