Epic: Refactor Quotes and Dialogue

[vkbo]

Prompted by @tmarplatt, this Epic ticket will track some efforts into improving handling of auto-replacement of quote symbols, and highlighting of dialogue. I've considered making some changes here for a while, and the feature requests contain a lot of ideas to build on.

Firstly, I would like to separate the quote replacement from the dialogue highlighting. The quote symbol settings are currently there to replace key presses on the keyboard of ' and " straight quotes with the user's preference of symbols. I don't want to change this feature. It is also not really what the feature requests are about.

Instead, I would like to define a set of rules for highlighting dialogue that better works for different languages. They should also work for alternative styles other than the standard rules. Sometimes an author also needs some creative flexibility here.

Feature Issues

• Support custom amounts of quoting levels #1770
• Support narrator break symbols and highlight rules #1771
• Allow preset quotation styles, localised to the current Project's language #1772
• Extend dialogue highlighting #1774

Implementation

A form to set these rules should have an easy way to pick the symbols to use without having to type them on the keyboard. Similar to the current quotes selector dialog, but with additional symbol, support like at least en and em dashes.

Add a new section named "Dialogue Highlighting" in Preferences for these settings, and consider making it possible to override them on a per-project basis by adding a "Override Dialogue Highlighting" page in Project Settings.

Related to #1770:

• Allow the user to select one of the configured quote styles as the dialogue quotes.
• Add rules to highlight a line staring with a specific symbol as dialogue. The common use case is lines starting with "—" or "–", but also other cases could be allowed for. The setting should be a free text box.
• Allow the user to define an alternate dialogue style. Since there is already a secondary dialogue highlight colour defined, used for single quotes now, this could be reused. The use case I have in mind is cases where I've seen authors invent a new syntax to indicate dialogue on another form than spoken words. Example is John Scalzi's "Old man's War" series where ::Person saying something:: indicates the communication is non-verbal through technology.
• Keep the setting to allow dialogue quotes to not be closed, which is common in some languages.

Related to #1771:

• Allow for narrator breaks inside of dialogue that use different symbols, like "—". This is fairly easy to do as demonstrated in the issue ticket.

Related to #1772:

• Allow defining language-specific presets. These cannot block the custom configuration by the user, but should load default settings for a given language.
• Allow a user to submit their settings for a given language that doesn't have a default set defined.

[tmarplatt]

Yes, an implicit feature request here is to allow creating dialogue/quoting rules per Project. I can even picture the need of having customised rules per Novel! (Perhaps the project is multilingual? Perhaps the author needs flexibility across works in a same project?)