Saturday 15 February 2003
Check out my smart new quotes
Finally got around to installing John Gruber’s SmartyPants plug-in for Movable Type. I wish I’d done it earlier since the text now looks so much better with smart quotes. I did strike one problem though. At first I thought SmartyPants was converting the ‘single quotes’ but not the “double quotes.” I soon realized that’s because I generally write my posts in Dreamweaver MX rather than a text editor and Dreamweaver converts double quotes entered in WYSIWYG mode to the " character entity.
I realize that to SmartyPantsIfy all my existing MT entries I’ll have to do a global find-and-replace—the thought of which makes me feel slightly sick. There is a Dreamweaver preference setting that would switch off the conversion to the " entity but that would also stop DW converting the <, >, and & characters to the appropriate entities (<, >, and &)
I guess I can do a find-and-replace on my post in Dreamweaver before pasting the HTML into Movable Type (or stop being a wuss and go back to using a text editor to write my entries).
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Ah, yes, SmartyPants. I was going to post about your installing it, but then I highlighted a sentence with an apostrophe, clicked my bookmarklet in Phoenix, and only got the text up to the apostrophe. Not one to be thrown off by such things, I switched to IE, highlighted the sentence, click my bookmarklet, and got the whole thing, with the apostrophe replaced by a lowercase a with a hat, a Euro symbol, and the trademark symbol. I thought about just copying and pasting into a regular textarea, but then that'll just end up giving me invalid HTML when I fail to notice and convert one of them to something postable.
But they are pretty, aren't they?
Smart quotes play havoc when translating Word docs into material suitable for the publication process at most publishers, including O'Reilly. Because of this, I'm not overly fond of smart quotes.
However, I am in favor of tweaking. Tweaking's good.
Older versions of Chimera used Apple ATSUI features to automatically smarten quotes, as well as doing the cool line end letter variations and retro ligatures in Hoefler.
Keynote turns this on too...
I am vaguely amazed that people expect software to insert characters for them. Why don't you do it God's own way-- type as normally in BBEdit (since, as every Macintosh user knows, you can type curled quotes and all manner of pi character, even the pi character itself, right on the keyboard), Select All, and Option-Command-T to convert them to entities instantaneously?
What is this business of installing plug-ins and waiting for some program's automated logic? Take responsibility for your own quotation marks.
Oh, right. I forgot. Windows.
Never mind.
I, um, type my own numerical entities. It's gotten to where it's automatic.
I admit I've got R programmed into F1 on my Kinesis, which helps.
I don't type quotation marks at all any more, I just use <q> tags and CSS to style the quotation marks.
Yeah, so IE doesn't understand <q>, but I figure five years is long enough to wait for MS to catch up.
I must admit I type out my single quotes in the #82xx format and do likewise for my em-dashes.
Interesting range of responses.
Serves you right for using bookmarklets with Phoenix and IE, Phil. Did you try Mozilla or Opera?
Bb, faced with that problem, I constructed a couple of Word macros that convert from dumb quotes to smart quotes and vice versa.
Kevin, no doubt I'll find out about ATSUI (means "hot" in Japanese) and Keynote when I buy that Macintosh.
Joe, when you type Cmd-Opt-T in BBEdit, does it convert to character entities or numeric entities (“ or “)?
Dorothea, I'm thinking about going back to using HomeSite because it allows you to assign hot-keys to code snippets.
Step, a former colleague sung the praises of PFE in exactly the same way. Eventually he saw the light and switched to TextPad:
http://www.textpad.com/
Laurabelle, I thought about using the tag but decided against it because of the problem with IE. Not that I like IE.
Lashlar, I really don't want to have to type Rxx; -- isn't this what computers are supposed to do for us?
Obviously, I'm biased. I wrote the damn thing.
That said, I write all my posts for Daring Fireball using BBEdit. I know BBEdit pretty well. If I wanted to, I could easily do my quote education there, rather than in MT. (In fact, I wrote a BBEdit text filter version of SmartyPants for when I'm creating web pages that aren't heading to my MT site.)
I don't like using Cmd-Opt-T to translate, because I don't want to write using unencoded "raw" smart quotes. I write using plain ASCII, but with real HTML markup. This lets me use BBEdit's syntax checker to help make sure each post is valid before I post it.
What it is is that I don't want to ever see the entities while I'm editing. Once they're in there, I find I can no longer proofread my articles. Too distracting. This is just personal taste, I suppose, because I don't mind seeing [p] tags and anchors and [em] and whatnot. But the entities for quotes distract the hell out of me.
Also, because SmartyPants is template-based, you can pick and choose which templates it applies to. I do not use it for my RSS feed, for example, because I suspect many RSS clients are not smart-quote savvy. So the smart quotes only go in my published web pages.
Phil's complaints are the ones with which I have the most sympathy. I don't care about his bookmarklets, but I do hate that using typographic entities makes it harder for some people to copy and paste text from my site for quoting. If only everyone used a decent text editor...
Maybe it's a matter of whether you are an essayist who happens to publish with blogging software, or a blogger who sometimes writes essays, I don't know. I can't imagine starting up another application to write a post, and then pasting it into MT. In fact, even if I'm only after one link or a TrackBack URL, I usually start to post from a bookmarklet, and save it as a draft if I need MT's full interface.
As to Mozilla and Opera, Phoenix is Mozilla, without the bloat and a chat program. Exactly the same result, cut off at the apostrophe. Opera gives pretty much the same result as IE. However, I prefer the bookmarklet response, where it's fairly obvious that something's wrong (though I've see people with days-old entries with quotes that include a-with-hat, Euro, TM) over copying and pasting in things that will be invalid, and may look completely different in someone else's browser.
But do as you like, I'll find a way to quote you anyway. Last time I quoted John, it only took me an extra ten minutes thanks to trying multiple browsers, and now I know I don't need to bother.
Sorry about the quoting problem, Phil. But I really love the smart quotes and I can't believe I avoided them for so long. I hate the idea of typing the entities by hand so SmartyPants is just the BeesKnees as far as I'm concerned.
This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed.
© Copyright 2002-2003 Jonathon Delacour
Ah, yes, SmartyPants. I was going to post about your installing it, but then I highlighted a sentence with an apostrophe, clicked my bookmarklet in Phoenix, and only got the text up to the apostrophe. Not one to be thrown off by such things, I switched to IE, highlighted the sentence, click my bookmarklet, and got the whole thing, with the apostrophe replaced by a lowercase a with a hat, a Euro symbol, and the trademark symbol. I thought about just copying and pasting into a regular textarea, but then that'll just end up giving me invalid HTML when I fail to notice and convert one of them to something postable.
But they are pretty, aren't they?
Posted by: Phil Ringnalda on 15 February 2003 at 04:29 PM