Ported by Chad Miller Copyright (c) 2004, 2007 Chad Miller
original SmartyPants by John Gruber Copyright (c) 2003 John Gruber
A smart-quotes plugin for Pyblosxom.
The priginal "SmartyPants" is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities.
This software, smartypants.py, endeavours to be a functional port of SmartyPants to Python, for use with Pyblosxom.
SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:
This means you can write, edit, and save your posts using plain old ASCII straight quotes, plain dashes, and plain dots, but your published posts (and final HTML output) will appear with smart quotes, em-dashes, and proper ellipses.
SmartyPants does not modify characters within <pre>, <code>, <kbd>, <math> or <script> tag blocks. Typically, these tags are used to display text where smart quotes and other "smart punctuation" would not be appropriate, such as source code or example markup.
If you need to use literal straight quotes (or plain hyphens and periods), SmartyPants accepts the following backslash escape sequences to force non-smart punctuation. It does so by transforming the escape sequence into a decimal-encoded HTML entity:
(FIXME: table here.)
This is useful, for example, when you want to use straight quotes as foot and inch marks: 6'2" tall; a 17" iMac.
For Pyblosxom users, the smartypants_attributes attribute is where you specify configuration options.
Numeric values are the easiest way to configure SmartyPants' behavior:
The following single-character attribute values can be combined to toggle individual transformations from within the smarty_pants attribute. For example, to educate normal quotes and em-dashes, but not ellipses or ``backticks'' -style quotes:
py['smartypants_attributes'] = "1"
The smartypants_forbidden_flavours list contains pyblosxom flavours for which no Smarty Pants rendering will occur.
For one thing, you might not care.
Most normal, mentally stable individuals do not take notice of proper typographic punctuation. Many design and typography nerds, however, break out in a nasty rash when they encounter, say, a restaurant sign that uses a straight apostrophe to spell "Joe's".
If you're the sort of person who just doesn't care, you might well want to continue not caring. Using straight quotes -- and sticking to the 7-bit ASCII character set in general -- is certainly a simpler way to live.
Even if you I do care about accurate typography, you still might want to think twice before educating the quote characters in your weblog. One side effect of publishing curly quote HTML entities is that it makes your weblog a bit harder for others to quote from using copy-and-paste. What happens is that when someone copies text from your blog, the copied text contains the 8-bit curly quote characters (as well as the 8-bit characters for em-dashes and ellipses, if you use these options). These characters are not standard across different text encoding methods, which is why they need to be encoded as HTML entities.
People copying text from your weblog, however, may not notice that you're using curly quotes, and they'll go ahead and paste the unencoded 8-bit characters copied from their browser into an email message or their own weblog. When pasted as raw "smart quotes", these characters are likely to get mangled beyond recognition.
That said, my own opinion is that any decent text editor or email client makes it easy to stupefy smart quote characters into their 7-bit equivalents, and I don't consider it my problem if you're using an indecent text editor or email client.
One situation in which quotes will get curled the wrong way is when apostrophes are used at the start of leading contractions. For example:
'Twas the night before Christmas.
In the case above, SmartyPants will turn the apostrophe into an opening single-quote, when in fact it should be a closing one. I don't think this problem can be solved in the general case -- every word processor I've tried gets this wrong as well. In such cases, it's best to use the proper HTML entity for closing single-quotes (’) by hand.
To file bug reports or feature requests (other than topics listed in the Caveats section above) please send email to: mailto:smartypantspy@chad.org
If the bug involves quotes being curled the wrong way, please send example text to illustrate.
Version numbers will track the SmartyPants version numbers, with the addition of an underscore and the smartypants.py version on the end.
New versions will be available at http://wiki.chad.org/SmartyPantsPy
John Gruber did all of the hard work of writing this software in Perl for Movable Type and almost all of this useful documentation. Chad Miller ported it to Python to use with Pyblosxom.
Portions of the SmartyPants original work are based on Brad Choate's nifty MTRegex plug-in. Brad Choate also contributed a few bits of source code to this plug-in. Brad Choate is a fine hacker indeed.
Jeremy Hedley and Charles Wiltgen deserve mention for exemplary beta testing of the original SmartyPants.
Rael Dornfest ported SmartyPants to Blosxom.
SmartyPants license:
Copyright (c) 2003 John Gruber
(http://daringfireball.net/)
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
distribution.
* Neither the name "SmartyPants" nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
software without specific prior written permission.
This software is provided by the copyright holders and contributors "as
is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited
to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a
particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright
owner or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental,
special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not
limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use,
data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any
theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort
(including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use
of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.
smartypants.py license:
smartypants.py is a derivative work of SmartyPants.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
distribution.
This software is provided by the copyright holders and contributors "as
is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited
to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a
particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright
owner or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental,
special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not
limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use,
data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any
theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort
(including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use
of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.