Apostrophes and quotes

[AEIOU]

Apostrophe's and "quotes" are driving me crazy.

Why is a ' not considered to be the same as a ’ ?

Or a " considered the same as a “ which is really the same as a ” ?

This is causing name recognition issues so autolinking is not autolinking. I'm forced to do a copy/replace on every single topic that might have them. That's three replacements every time I paste text in....

[Ladyofdragons]

well, they're all completely separate ascii characters (check http://www.ascii-code.com/). So, they're not the same.

Are they consistent in the document you're copying from? Might be easiest to just follow the format there for your original, like aliasing your NPC with the left/right quotes as a part of the name.

[MaxSupernova]

That really is a data cleansing issue, which is your responsibility.

As LadyofDragons pointed out, they are totally different characters that actually shouldn't be treated equally.

There are many ways that you can work on cleaning up your input data, like using an autohotkey macro to replace them whenever they showup in your input stream, or using a text editor to replace them all before pasting into RW.

[AEIOU]

Ummm, these are computers, not typewriters. They can do these things for us.... Really. During the check for a link match, a simple regular expression check would make this all invisible to everyone. It's already doing this for capitalizations.

It's somewhat amusing because I can pull the data into Excel, do a search/replace on the ALT-0146 apostrophe to replace with the keyboard ALT-0130 apostrophe. But Word swaps everything to an ALT-0146. And of course RW uses an ALT-0130 because that's what our keyboards are mapped to. Some PDF's use one format, others the other.

I can certainly make it work with aliases. But this forum is for suggestions to help make RW more usable for people that may not be quite as savvy as you.

[MaxSupernova]

Sorry I wasn't trying to be snarky.

Oh, it would be nice if RW considered them the same.

Your post just asked why they weren't, and I tried to answer that and offer a couple of suggestions in the meantime.

They aren't considered the same for the same reason that "A" and "B" aren't considered the same. They are completely different characters with different purposes. It's not as much of a no-brainer decision to convert all quotes as you seemed to imply.

If you'd like to see a feature that would consider all types of quotes the same and convert them all to one consistent type, that's cool.

[AEIOU]

And sorry for my defensiveness. Note to self: don't post on days that work is irritating....

A and a, or B and b, or ALT-0130 and ALT-0146 are seen by us as equivalent but are coded and interpreted by the computer as different. RW just needs one more layer of logic to work on these regular expressions.

[Ladyofdragons]

Not to be contrary, but A and a are not equivalent to me in certain circumstances.

Whatever logic you are thinking would need to be rather complex and optional for each character. Rather like how Microsoft Word's autoreplace feature works, where you would maintain a list of what you want to be replaced that can be added to or subtracted from. That word behavior you mentioned above is configurable.

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by Ladyofdragons

Not to be contrary, but A and a are not equivalent to me in certain circumstances.

Whatever logic you are thinking would need to be rather complex and optional for each character. Rather like how Microsoft Word's autoreplace feature works, where you would maintain a list of what you want to be replaced that can be added to or subtracted from. That word behavior you mentioned above is configurable.

A and a are equivalent within Realm Works. If I create an article titled "Halloween" and I reference it in a different article as "halloween", Realm Works will make the connection and ask you if you want to create the link.

AEIOU is saying that technically, it's just as simple to match H to h as it is to match the two different types of quotes and the two different types of apostrophes.

[Bidmaron]

I'd argue that doing the apostrophes makes more sense than upper and lower case treatment. I cannot think of a single example where I'd want the two (actually three) types of single quotes treated differently -- EVER (and the same for double quotes). However, I frequently wish that I had the ability (no pun intended) for RW to consider 'ability' when not capitalized as just a word with no special meaning, whereas if I used 'Ability,' it would create a link to the rule system's information on character abilities.

[AEIOU]

Exactly, Bidmaron. I dropped it because I'm hoping spell check gets added this year with autocorrect, in which case this is moot and I can do it myself. But that is a much more difficult change to RW....

Your example of capitalization recognition brings another point in that some topics I really don't ever want to link to automatically. For example, I never realized how many times "set" is used and I certainly don't want to link 99% of them to the god of knowledge and death.... I'd prefer to manually link the 1%.

I'm working around these things but I'm a little more tech savvy than many gamers who will stumble over this and I want RW to appeal to everyone right out of the box.