How to decorate line-wrap?

English
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#1

LO 7.5.3.2, Fedora 38

Traditional typography highlights “nested dialogues” in novels with a repeated sign as first character in successive lines. This is an example:

– Do you know what happened ?, Angus asked.
– No, I was too busy to care, Bess answered.
– Then, I’ll tell you, Angus replied. Charles said: « This
« is a long story I can hardly summarise in
« a few words ». And he began to explain
the chain of events …
– Please, to the point, Bess interrupted.

The opening quotation mark is repeated at start of every line making the nested dialogue.

Is there a way to imitate such a layout?

The location of line wrap is unpredictable and changes when test is edited. Consequently, manually inserting the character is not a solution.

As it is very likely it is not doable with current Writer implementation, I dream awake about some kind of an “abstract character style” applied on the nested dialogue. Such a style definition would declare the opening, closing and “repeating” “quotes” for an automatic management by the layout engine. However, this would require the capability to have several character styles applied on character sequences so that other traditional styles like Emphasis can also be applied within the nested dialogue. Presently, multiple character styles application is problematic (independently from OASIS specification) and is not implemented despite a few attempts in the past. Among the difficulties are the order of application, edit management, consistency, … They are not close to be solved.

Meanwhile, any idea how to do it?

#2

The most similar that I can think is the character border; but as now, there are only line styles.
imagen

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately, as you say, only lines can be used. In addition, for maximum versatility, this requires multi-character style.

#4

I remember old books with that style. But IIRC, the quotation marks are only repeated at the start of a paragraph, not at the start of every new line.

#5

It depends on books and possibly countries. I have an early-XIXth century book (a really wonderful book with lithographies) which is laid out as such. I was surprised at first because we are no longer used to it.

#6

That’s the case in Spanish with multi-paragraph quotes, but the second and following paragraphs begin with a closing quotation mark.

«Some text.
»Some more text».
#7

Dutch here. In the old days, Dutch quotation marks were as in „Literal quote”, she said. I read old books with that typesetting as a kid, when they were already outdated, and found the repeating quotation marks irritating, as if they implied that I was too dumb to remember that what I was reading, was part of what a personage was saying. Repeating the quotation mark at the start of every line would have killed me.

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#8

I found another layout in 40+ years old French novels:

Angus was anxious to report the situation to Bess.
« Do you know what happened ?», Angus asked.
« No, I was too busy to care.
– Then, I’ll tell you. This is a long story I can
hardly summarise  a few words …
– Please, to the point  », Bess interrupted.

Here the quotation marks delimit a continuous sequence of speech. Annotation like “he said”, “X. replied” are not speech and must not be included inside quotes. Of course, such a layout doesn’t need anything special to be implemented.

I didn’t find any example of “nested dialogues” but I guess they wouldn’t be marked by special “tags” like in my example of the XIXth century book which text, incidentally, was written during the XVIIIth

#9

How could you ever tell that the different lines are spoken by different persons if you don’t understand what they mean? IMO, you will have to do this kind of formatting dialogue by hand.

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