Typography: replace "..." with "…" and so son
I'm searching for a way or module, which replaces wrong used glyphs with the correct ones (what Typography teaches). For those characters, that we can't access directly with standard keyboards. Examples:
(conditional on the language)
replace "..." with the ellipsis "…"
replace "-" with the dash "–" (where needed)
use the correct apostoph,
use the correct quotation marks,
and so on
So let's say, if the language is set to German and an user types:
"Lorem Ipsum"
it should automatically (after submitting) be replaced with
„Lorem Ipsum“
As far as I know the CMS "Textpattern" has this feature (I don't know if it's conditional on Textile or an independet implementation). A method, where the users would have to type "--" for a dash or something like that would be okay. But I'd prefer an automatic method, because many users don't know about typography.
Try
Try http://drupal.org/project/marksmarty
There is also http://drupal.org/project/typogrify but I don't see it updated for Drupal 6. There are however some D6 patches in its issues queue.
Before doing any of that make sure that your database has a consistent utf8 character set and collation throughout.
Try
Would I have to use this special syntax, so that the glyphs are replaced correctly, or can I use it with filtered HTML or BBCode or something else?
If I understand it right, typogrify is only the part of marksmarty, that I search (and markdown is the module, which provides the new syntax). That would be cool. But I'd have to wait for an official Drupal 6 release.
Do you know, how I can check this?
marksmarty works fine in
marksmarty works fine in D6... you can enable just the SmartyPants portion of it (the typographic features) and leave MarkDown off. Turn on the "Markdown with SmartyPants" filter in your Filtered HTML input format. Then click the Configure tab and expand the "Markdown with SmartyPants" fieldset. Set Enable MarkDown to No, and Enable SmartyPants to Yes.
On the other hand there are D6 patches waiting for review for Typogrify module. If you eventually change from MarkSmarty to Typogrify when it's updated, should be seamless.
-- David
absolutecross.com
[new guide/lesson in progress: Creating a CCK and Views powered Drupal site - feedback welcome]
Obviously markdown and
Obviously markdown and smartypants are two separate functions of the first module, so you don't need to use the markdown markup, only smartypants' notation (http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants).
Typogrify works in a more automated way, without special notation. If you can't apply the submitted patches yourself then you must either read about it in the handbook or wait for a D6 release.
My last comment was because as long as you only have standard English characters some inconsistencies don't matter much, but as soon as you start introducing special Unicode characters you need to check your database with phpmyadmin and make sure that the charset/collation of all your database tables is "utf8_general_ci" everywhere (and not "latin1" or anything else).
Note that Typogrify:
Note that Typogrify: http://drupal.org/project/typogrify has been updated to Drupal 6, so I'd recommend using that, possibly in combination with Markdown