SmartyPants 1.0

Wednesday, 13 November 2002

Remember my instructions for generating smart quotes in Movable Type using Brad Choate’s MTPerlScript plug-in? Forget about that. I’ve got something better now.

Introducing SmartyPants, a free plug-in for Movable Type (version 2.5 or later).

SmartyPants is much improved over my previous MTPerlScript-based solution. New features:

  • Much easier to use and install. It’s just a simple plug-in, and it can be invoked from templates like so: 

    	<$MTEntryBody smarty_pants="1"$>

  • Smarter algorithm, fixing several cases where quotes were curled in the wrong direction.

  • Now supports ``backticks'' -style quotes and smart ellipses.

  • Ignores content inside <pre> and <code> tags.

Details, download, and documentation are all available on the SmartyPants project page.

If you’re currently using my previous smart quotes solution, I highly recommend you switch to SmartyPants. It’s easier, more accurate, faster, and offers you more control over which transformations occur when you publish articles.