Formatting woes

I've just spent an hour trying to follow the 'consignes de présentation' for a journal.  I'm resigned for now to have to spend a bit of time mucking about with commas and dates and the like for bibliographical things.  I've tried using Mendeley or EndNoteWeb but each time I've tried it has been much more effort to get the stuff into a database and then put in the codes than to just type it in myself.

But this time the annoyance came from having to convert my English formatting of inverted commas and footnote references placed after punctuation to a continental European format with « and » and footnote references before punctuation.  I've probably missed some so I hope my editor will forgive me.  Is there, however, any handy automated way to do all this?  I did the Find-Replace thing for the inverted commas but couldn't work out how to differentiate between them at the end of a quotation and when they are used as a possessive in e.g. 'the Cyrenaics'...' so I had to do much of that manually too.  Groan.