Textiled Smarty Pants

SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into smart typographic punctuation HTML entities.

It may be noted that SmartyPants can work in conjunction with Brad Choate’s MT-Textile plug-in. MT-Textile is a port of Dean Allen’s original Textile project to Perl and Movable Type. MT-Textile by itself only translates Textile markup to HTML. However, if SmartyPants is also installed, MT-Textile will call on SmartyPants to educate quotes, dashes, and ellipses, automatically.

Using SmartyPants in conjunction with MT-Textile requires no modifications to your Movable Type templates. I had mine to automatically use Textile 2 for “Default Text Formatting for new entries”, it also became automatically available on the desktop blog publishing software,

With the release of MT 3.1, you have another option of text formating. MarkDown can be used in conjunction with Smarty Pants.