Quote and dash fixer
Paste a paragraph or a whole chapter and pick a style. You get back curly quotation marks, real apostrophes, the right dashes, ellipses and no-break spaces, with every change marked. It runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
What it changes
| You typed | English | German |
|---|---|---|
| "Yes," she said. | “Yes,” she said. | „Ja“, sagte sie. |
| 'yes' | ‘yes’ | ‚ja‘ or ›ja‹ |
| don't, '90s, geht´s | don’t, ’90s | geht’s |
| wait - what, wait -- what | wait—what | warte – was |
| pages 12-15 | pages 12–15 | S. 12–15 |
| Well... or . . . | Well… | Na… |
| 10 km, 20 % | no line break between the number and the unit | |
Quotes that are already curly but wrong are set right too: Word’s English quotes on German text, a closing quote at the start of a word, an accent typed for an apostrophe. Double spaces become one. Each line is a paragraph of its own, as it is when you paste from Word.
Opening or closing
A typewriter quote has no direction, so the fixer reads it from the character before it: after a space, a bracket or the start of a paragraph it opens, after a letter or punctuation it closes. A single quote after a letter is an apostrophe unless a single quote is open, so the boys’ hats keep theirs. Right after a dash, a quote closes the one that is open and otherwise opens a new one.
Dashes
English sets the em dash closed, with no space on either side, the way most American and many British publishers do. German uses the en dash with a space on each side, the Gedankenstrich, and the fixer keeps it on the line of the word before it, so no line starts with a dash, except dialogue that opens with one. Number ranges take an en dash; dates, ISBNs and phone numbers keep their hyphens.
No-break spaces
A no-break space looks like a space but keeps the words on either side on one line. The fixer puts one between a number and its unit (10 km, 20 %). In German style it also goes inside abbreviations such as z. B. and d. h. (typed with or without the space) and after S., Nr. and §.
The same rules as the app
These are the rules Kernsetzer applies when it sets a book, in the PDF and the EPUB alike, so you don’t need this page for a manuscript you set with it: the app quotes as it typesets, and switching the book’s language re-quotes everything. The fixer is for the blurb, the newsletter, the shop page and everything else. My other free tool is the KDP margin calculator. Sign up for the beta.