Lee, if you can't educate your copywriters, there is not a lot you can do up front. Either disable automatic quotes and expect straight ones in your plain text, or enable them and you have to check every inch and foot mark (as well as minutes and seconds, by the way).

I think you're best off with enabling them, because you can use a GREP search to look for digit-then-curly-quote — the most common case where you want to change them. The opposite, checking which straight quotes to change to curlies, is a bit more difficult.

You can search for this, using GREP Find: for single quotes,

(?<=d)~]

and for double quotes,

(?<=d)~}

You can replace them with straight quotes from your text font (use the code ~' — that's a tilde, followed by a single straight quote, for feet, or ~” — tilde, straight double quotes for inch).

If you are inclined to typographically correctness, follow David's advice and insert the actual Symbol symbols. For these, you should replace with either x{2032} (single) or x{2033} (double), and don't forget to set the font to Symbol in the Replace With formatting field. (I lean towards ridiculous correctness and always create a character style containing just “Symbol”, especially for things like these.)

Whatever you change it to: do not hit the Replace All button straight away! Use “Change/Find Next” until you are fairly sure your document does not contain a phrase such as

“How old are you my child?” “I am 5″, answered Mary.

(It gets a bit difficult when that question is, “How tall are you my child?” Then you'd need some more context.)

Lee, if you can't educate your copywriters, there is not a lot you can do up front. Either disable automatic quotes and expect straight ones in your plain text, or enable them and you have to check every inch and foot mark (as well as minutes and seconds, by the way).

I think you're best off with enabling them, because you can use a GREP search to look for digit-then-curly-quote — the most common case where you want to change them. The opposite, checking which straight quotes to change to curlies, is a bit more difficult.

You can search for this, using GREP Find: for single quotes,

(?<=\d)~]

and for double quotes,

(?<=\d)~}

You can replace them with straight quotes from your text font (use the code ~' — that's a tilde, followed by a single straight quote, for feet, or ~” — tilde, straight double quotes for inch).

If you are inclined to typographically correctness, follow David's advice and insert the actual Symbol symbols. For these, you should replace with either \x{2032} (single) or \x{2033} (double), and don't forget to set the font to Symbol in the Replace With formatting field. (I lean towards ridiculous correctness and always create a character style containing just “Symbol”, especially for things like these.)

Whatever you change it to: do not hit the Replace All button straight away! Use “Change/Find Next” until you are fairly sure your document does not contain a phrase such as

“How old are you my child?” “I am 5″, answered Mary.

(It gets a bit difficult when that question is, “How tall are you my child?” Then you'd need some more context.)

Hi Annamarie,

Are your chapters in separate files? (I think so because otherwise you could not use the same name and different definitions :-)) In that case, you could even use the same color name, and only change the swatch definition!

I'm pretty sure something can be cooked up like that. Not by me, though, I gave up trying to write ID plugins when Javascript got better, faster, and stronger, and mostly version-independent and totally (almost) platform-independent.

Writing ID plugins is difficult. You need extensive knowledge of your InDesign version, your OS, and not to forget C++ (on Windows; Objective-C on the Mac). ID uses a set of public libraries, but even that is no relief, because these are so exotic that their programmers don't feel like explaining even the basic concepts (at least, that's how it seems to me ).

You could suggest this in the Adobe InDesign SDK Forum, but since writing plugins is so difficult and time-consuming — and, not to mention, you have to start over for each new version of ID — the general vibe I get from that forum is no-one is interested in writing stuff just for the heck of it.

Do you have any ideas on how it ought to work? Just like GREP styles do? (GREP styles can concatenate, and apply different styles on top of each other. I can't imagine how that would work for paragraph styles …)

I'm pretty sure something can be cooked up like that. Not by me, though, I gave up trying to write ID plugins when Javascript got better, faster, and stronger, and mostly version-independent and totally (almost) platform-independent.

Writing ID plugins is difficult. You need extensive knowledge of your InDesign version, your OS, and not to forget C++ (on Windows; Objective-C on the Mac). ID uses a set of public libraries, but even that is no relief, because these are so exotic that their programmers don't feel like explaining even the basic concepts (at least, that's how it seems to me ).

You could suggest this in the Adobe InDesign SDK Forum, but since writing plugins is so difficult and time-consuming — and, not to mention, you have to start over for each new version of ID — the general vibe I get from that forum is no-one is interested in writing stuff just for the heck of it.

Do you have any ideas on how it ought to work? Just like GREP styles do? (GREP styles can concatenate, and apply different styles on top of each other. I can't imagine how that would work for paragraph styles …)

.. or a medium long form: i-=1 ;-)

David is looking into a file attachment option. I think that's the best solution: no more cumbersome copying entire scripts into and out of a post, no ultra-long posts, and if you want to point out interesting features or techniques, you can always insert code fragments in the text.

Sorry I forgot to add I'm on CS4.

Oof! What a relief. The simple 6-line script I wrote works perfectly, in that it converts all tables that start in your currently selected text frame to text (a table that's partially in a previous frame will not, one that starts in the current and runs into the next frame will). But– as I was just checking out CS5 for possible bugs, and the table system did not change, I thought “well, let's just do it”.

It does not work in CS5! Fortunately you thought of mentioning your version, but I'm gonna throw this spanner into the wheel of Adobe's scripting forum, just in case.

Copy the script, paste into Adobe's ESTK Editor and then save as “tablestotext.jsx” in the Scripts folder.