Tweak card text for better typography

[tphinney]

I would love to tweak the text on the cards to use better typography:

• proper curly apostrophes instead of the vertical typewriter apostrophes
• same with quote marks, if any are used
• dashes instead of hyphens, where appropriate (I am open to either spaced en dashes, or em dashes)

[cameronwilson314]

Could you leave an example of what you are envisioning?

[nickv2002]

I'm pretty sure @tphinney is thinking of similar text transformations as SmartyPants (though we don't need to do it with a script of course).

SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity

[tphinney]

Gosh, Nick beat me to it. But since I already was in the midst of writing it up, I finished. Notable issue: dashes may not be formatted as multiple dashes, so would need manual correction even if you did use some automated process.

Vertical typewriter apostrophe is like this: '
Real apostrophe is like this: ’
As in “opponent's card” should be “opponent’s card”

Vertical typewriter quotes are "like this" while proper typographic quotes are “like these.”

Note that there are cases where a hyphen has been used-like this - or like this. Such cases should be a dash—like this. Actually, either an em dash (without spaces on either side) or an en dash with spaces is acceptable. I am an em dash fan, but I don’t think it is as fashionable right now as the spaced en dash – like this.

[sumpfork]

Doing this in a script during the language build (which I've been automating more) could be ok if we can get consistently acceptable results. Note that there's some work here, as we'd need to do it during language processing when we have access to the actual text that needs to be formatted (not the JSON files), and we'd need to configure the script to ignore or strip/reinsert all the formatting tags that we use.

[tphinney]

I think the best way to do this would be:

1. an initial automated pass at processing the text
2. manual check over the processed text to look for potential errors (preferably not in a one-file-per-card format). This needn't be a look-at-every-single-text check, more of a spot check.
3. possibly rinse and repeat, if there are any systematic errors in processing

I am open to doing or helping with that manual spot check on the English files, if y’all like.

Note that there can be equivalent issues for some other languages, but at least their quote marks are usually OK already, from what I've seen. Some languages have the funny benefit that the quote marks are not in ASCII in the first place, and often their open and close quotes are more strongly differentiated, so they were right in the first place.