Wrong dialog opening quote used when dialog is italicized

[ShadowWayve]

In my novel, I am using italicized text for dialog that is spoken telepathically (mind to mind), as opposed to out loud. I want the opening and closing quote characters to be italicized as well.

In novelWriter, I end up typing something like this:

_"I am speaking directly into your mind."_ she said.

In novelWriter itself, the text looks the same no matter when I add the underscore characters to italicize the text. See screenshot:

But after the text is exported to an .odt file, the opening quote character is different, depending on when I added the underscore characters. See this screenshot (I manually added a newline between the two examples):

I discovered this issue after novelWriter chose bizarre intellisense colors in a paragraph where the character spoke out loud to some people, and privately to another person.

This is what the exported .odt file looks like for this more complex case (I manually added a newline between the two examples):

Closing and reopening novelWriter doesn't fix the issue. The scene's document remembers what order I typed the characters in. This strikes me as wrong. Is there a "please re-process all the text I've written" button? Then again, in this particular case, it seems like novelWriter would do the wrong thing if it re-interpreted what I've typed. Still, I hope this bug gets fixed before it's time to publish my novel.

Thank you for your amazing work!

Software details:

• OS: Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition) (latest)
• novelWriter version: 2.7.4 (latest, installed GitHub AppImage via Gear Lever).

[vkbo]

In novelWriter itself, the text looks the same no matter when I add the underscore characters to italicize the text.

novelWriter doesn't process quotes at all after they've been typed, so when you're saying there is no difference in the editor, that's likely due to your choice of font. The mixup does happen there. In general, if you type a quote after a character, it will assume you want a closing quote. So the _" combo doesn't do what you want.

It is not a bug though. It is designed that way, following a set of very simple rules. An open quote is only inserted after a space or at the beginning of the line. The rules are the same as LibreOffice Writer uses. Of course, there is no markup there, but if you type _", it does the same thing as novelWriter. I cannot simply exclude the underscore here from the decision logic either, because then this wouldn't render correctly:

“Text with one word _underscored_”

It is impossible to account for all possible corner cases writers can come up with. This seems to be one of those for your specific use case.

The solution is, as you seem to have noticed, to type the underscore after you've typed the quote. In either case, even if I made a change to the logic, it wouldn't fix what you've already typed. You can do a search/replace in the editor of _” and replace with _“ with "Search Next File" toggled on, which should make it easy to fix it in the manuscript.

If you select a font for the editor where the quote directions are more visible, you should be able to spot it right away.

[vkbo]

Ok, so I was thinking a little bit more about the problem. If the markup before the quote is preceded by a space, the markup cannot apply to the left anyway, and must therefore be intended for the quoted string. I think I can make it work. A test implementations seems to do what you want here, and it does make sense to at least account for standard novelWriter markup.

These test strings worked as intended when typing straight ahead:

I'll add this as an improvement for 2.8.

Edit: I changed the editor font to "Fira Sans Regular", which makes the quote directions visible.

[vkbo]

Done. It will be included in 2.8, which is a little while away still.

As I said, this will not fix your existing text, but the search/replace approach I mentioned should clear it up pretty quickly.

[ShadowWayve]

Thank you for the super quick turnaround on this! I didn't realize that this behavior was part of an autocorrect / autoreplace feature. I'm definitely changing the font in novelWriter now. 😄

I am now experimenting with different fonts, to see if I can find one that works for me. "Fira Sans Regular" supposedly is installed on my machine, but I can't select it in novelWriter (which I am sure isn't a novelWriter bug, because other pieces of software on my machine are experiencing the same issue).

Thanks again!