SmartyPants in other languages than English

[ceberlin]

Hi everyone,

I just discovered SmartyPants and I like the idea. It just does not work in every language out of the box.

The typography rules for Germany and France, for example, are different and the English set does not work here.

At least that's what I think it does.

What we do now from PW is the language used in the field.

Would it not be nice to be able to select a setting for SmartyPants which is language dependent?

I cannot figure out how yet, but I wanted to drop that idea here for discussion first.

[Gazley]

I had never come across SmartyPants prior to your post and took a look. It is quite an old project; doesn't look like much has changed since circa 2005. It struck me that some of what it does might be achievable in Markdown which I believe there might be existing Textformatter support in PW.

[Adam Kiss]

Textile has some support for typographic quotes and such, not really sure of markdown. But seeing how this is basically a subset (precursor?) to markdown, I think this should be in markdown.

(haven't heard of this before as well; however, there are textformatters for textile and markdown)

[ryan]

SmartyPants is separate from Markdown, though the two often go together. I think they are both originally from the same author actually. SmartyPants just adds auto replacement of regular "quotes" to curly “quotes”, replacement of straight apostrophes to curly apostrophes, replacement of 3 dashes to em dashes, replacement of two dashes to en dashes, and replacement of 3 periods to ellipsis. As far as I know, the language support is limited to those that would use those characters. Since what SmartyPants does is all pretty simple, it wouldn't be too hard to make a textformatter plugin for another language that does something similar. I think the quotes and apostrophes are the only ones that require some context logic to make sure they are going where they should and not where they shouldn't.