Hi !
I’m thinking about an improvement for Dabble that would certainly apply to only a few writers.
As a french native speaker, I mainly uses Dabble for writing in French. The thing is, we doesn’t use the same quotation marks for dialogues.
Dabble default is “revoir”. While French should be « revoir ».
Is there a way to change default quotation marks ? I’m actually exporting my works to LibreOffice and using Grammalecte to correct this, and it’s not a problem at all.
Oooh, that’s interesting. When you type quote marks when writing French, do you still use " and your programs convert it to « automatically? Or is there another key you use?
How very interesting. These are called Guillemet and according to the WikipediA article:
Macintosh users can together press ⌥ Opt\ to type « and ⌥ Opt⇧Shift\ to type ».
The more I learn the less I know.
We press the key for " and Word and LibreOffice are usually set so that it converts to «. You can’t see it, but if you press ctrl+z just aftwards, you’ll see " instead of «.
I think the default setting for french users is the guillemets.
I think it is so messy to have to press 2-3 keys for each and every dialogues just for the quotations marks XD Hopefully there is Grammalecte’s text formator !
By the way, in French, the standard typography for dialogue is like that :
« Hi ! How are you ? said Emile.
— I’m fine, Jean replied. And you ?
— I’m fine too. »
2-3 key keyboard shortcuts require writers to have very athletic fingers. It also requires some training before the exercise becomes easy.
This reminds me of “smartypants” which is software that silently converts the English vertical quotes into “smart quotes” or “curly quotes.”
Indeed in the bowels of Dabble sits this kind of functionality because the smart quotes simply appear though I type straight quotes. Smart quotes have an opening and a closing quote symbol not found on my keyboard.
I’d love that option as well! I’m german but the french quotation marks are used in the majority of books here.
Dabble does indeed have smart quotes built in. When not in Dabble, Opt[ produces “ and OptShift[ produces ” on Mac, and ] will do the same for ‘ and ’.