I am revising my sci-fi novel, and while the Linguistic Focus > Direct Speech is excellent for “normal” dialogue between characters, I also have other forms of communication. For instance, I have several telepathic characters. For my book, I’ve chosen to represent telepathic dialogue with angle brackets and italics (similar to using italics for internal monologues).
<This is an example of telepathic communication,> she said from the back of her mind.
I would love it if there were a way to create new Linguistic Focus options for things like this. Using something like regular expressions to identify the use of brackets and italics together would help immensely.
If you use the French Guillemets, you can do this now. The setting in the Corrections Options determine with quote marks to use.
Or switching the normal quotes with the single bracket using RegEx might work.
I looked at the Corrections options (screenshot above) but there’s nothing that lets me select French guillemots as a quotation/dialogue indicator. If it helps, I’m on a Mac, and there are no system options that seem applicable. Is that what you’re talking about, AntoniDol?
For now, I’m using find/replace to turn angle brackets into “<this is telepathic dialogue,>” but I’m not a fan of how that looks (using < > and « » both look great, especially when italicized). I’m also worried about changing them temporarily during revisions (cleaning up dialogue, etc) but then missing something if I change them back during proofreading.
Why not setup something in Substitutions, like I have, but instead of having the result produce arrows, have them replaced with guillemots. After a while pressing three keys in succession becomes second nature.
The text replacement isn’t really an issue for me (it’s easy to do substitutions on a Mac). It’s really the Linguistic Focus / Direct Speech feature to highlight dialogue that I’m after. Direct Speech detects anything in double quotes, but nothing else triggers the highlighting (which is why I was requesting a new plugin for allowing other delimiters or regex). French guillemots don’t trigger speech highlighting, either, so changing the format for telepathic dialogue doesn’t help (unless I quote the angle-bracketed text, which doesn’t look good stylistically).
That’s what I’m doing now, and it “works” (no pun intended) but I do worry about the risk of missing them when doing global replacements during final proofreading.
Yeah, I need the Linguistic Focus highlighting to happen in the editor, for the highlighting to work, so that’s why I would have to convert my manuscript to use quotes for now. I’ve written 120k words using the angle brackets as the telepathic dialogue style. Now I’m doing revisions and edits, and I want to read dialogue (including the telepathic format)
on its own.
On the Mac, the quotation marks are set at the system level. See the Apple → System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources pane. So you could try switching to one of the non-English choices there and seeing if Linguistic Focus switches as well.
