Fixing Word-generated quote marks in RH projects

[Guest]

Hi, all.

I am running RH8 and generating HTML help. I have imported a large amount of text from Word and have since learned that Word’s “smart quotes” are showing up as question marks in the user context (although they look OK in Robohelp). I’d like to fix this in the Robohelp HTML file.

Here is what I see when I look at the HTML in Robohelp:

Curly opening quote from Word shows as: “

Curly opening quote from Word shows as: ”

Straight quote shows as: " (This is the goal for both Word quotes.)

Curly apostrophe from Word shows as: ’

Straight apostrophe shows as: ' (This is the goal for apostrophes.)

It seems like a straightforward Find/Replace should fix this. But when I attempt to use the RH “Find and Replace in Files” function on the project folder, looking for the Word quotes, I get the error “No files found with matching text”.

I have been using cut/paste to copy the characters in question directly out of Robohelp HTML and into the Find/Replace boxes. I have tried both settings of the “Ignore HTML tags” checkbox, and have allowed searching of files named *.* (i.e. all files in the folder) but I get the same error.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

The only posts about this that I find on this forum suggest using a third-party find/replace tool, and I will find and install one of those if it’s really necessary, but that would require getting approval from our internal IT department, so I’d rather not.

Any help appreciated!

-- George

[Guest]

Minor typo in my post:

Curly opening quote from Word shows as: “

Curly closing quote from Word shows as: ”

[Captiv8r]

Hi George

You may find the simplest approach would involve deleting the topics in question, turning off the "smart quote" feature in Word, then re-importing into RoboHelp.

Just a thought... Rick

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[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestion, Rick. I learned my lesson and I've been doing exactly what you suggest when writing new topics.

But it's too late for the existing ones, which have been heavily edited in Robohelp. At least 20 hours of work would need to be re-done if I had to re-import. Surely there's a better solution...

[Peter Grainge]

Look at the HTML code for the smart quotes. Can you not search on those and replace with the required quotes? The multi file fiind and replace should be OK for this purpose.

Backup the project before you start.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Peter, that is exactly what I tried to do.

I tried using copy and paste to copy the "bad" quotes directly from the HTML view into Find and Replace in Files, and it fails to find them. It reports "No files found with matching text". (I also tested with ordinary text characters, just to make sure Find and Replace was working properly, and they are found without a problem.)

It seems as if these quote characters are specifically excluded from Find and Replace--or else I'm doing something remarkably bone-headed.

It's beginning to look as if I'll have to get a third-party tool to fix this--either that, or search the original Word files for quotes and then find each hit in the corresponding Robohelp Topics, which would take several hours.

[Peter Grainge]

Post the code for the smart quotes, both styles.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Hmm, I see the problem now. I think smart quotes used to come in with the HTML code, now they show as smart quotes.

Good news though, I found the Find and Replace failed until I turned on Case Sensitive. Try that.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Peter, you're a genius! It works when I check Case Sensitive. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

How on earth did you figure that out?

[Peter Grainge]

You have to press the Shift Key to enter quotes so it made me think Case Sensitive was worth a shot.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Brilliant!

[Guest]

I was previously having the same issue and aside from trying to instruct everyone to turn off anything "Smart" in Word under the auto-correction features, I had actually created a Microsoft Smart Quote to RoboHelp HTML language chart. I distributed this chart, see below, to my fellow RoboHelp publishers within my company so that they could use it in conjunction with RoboHelp's find/replace function to correct the ever annoying Smart Quotes. The list I have thus far is as follows:

Find…	Replace With…	Comment
&endash;	-
&ldots;	…	This command is a lowercase L and not an i
’r;	'
’	'
’	'
”r;	"
”	"
”	"

By doing a "Case Sensitive" search for the characters in the "Find" column and replacing them with the character(s) in the "Replace with" column the Smart Quotes go away.

Does anyone happen to have a full listing of how all of the various "Microsoft Smart Quotes" appear in RoboHelp and what the appropriate HTML coding would be to replace them?

[Peter Grainge]

No list available but thanks for publishing that one.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

In the HTML, the "bad" quotes (Word smart quotes) are single characters. When I paste them into this forum window, they both come out as straight, vertical quotes. Here is the word "fixed" surrounded by the Word quotes, cut and pasted from Robohelp:  “fixed” .

If I switch to HTML view as I write this, I can see that this is represented by "“fixed”" in the HTML text. I'm not sure if you will see this once I've sent it, so let me describe what is happening: when I paste a Word "opening quote" from Robohelp into this Forum's editor, then toggle the editor's HTML view, I see 7 characters: ampersand, then "ldquo" (without the quotes), then semicolon. Similarly, when I paste the closing quote (a single character) and toggle to HTML, I see 7 characters: ampersand, then "rdquo" (without the quotes), then semicolon.

The quotes I actually want show up (in Robohelp's HTML view) as " (that's 6 characters: ampersand, then "quot" (without the quotes), then semicolon).