Sublime Forum

Typography package for writing prose (smart quotes, em/endash, ellipsis...)

#1

Hello,

I own ST3 license, but due to having lot of setup under Emacs, I was not using ST3 regularly, iow. mostly for web work where it really does excel.

Now, I’m moving my setup to some non-Emacs related stuff and the future brings less code and more prose (along with some web-related tasks), as well as working on slide-presentations, so it’s wonderful opportunity to dive deeper into ST…

On Emacs I was using typoel package which is very convenient since one can configure one’s preferred type of quotes which then can be entered by using normal quotes (" ").

Moreover, typing dash (’-’) repeatedly produces normal dash, endash and emdash, while ‘…’ gives one ellipsis. It’s very handy to get a text with proper glyphs without the need to do some post-processing.

Another plus was that the Python-powered static-site-generator which I use does have ability to post-process the content by applying smartypants Python package which is, unfortunately, unmaintained and does not e.g. handle emadash properly.

I have looked amongst available packages for ST3 and found only TypeSnippets which is a bit cumbersome, iow. to enter some snippet, one has to write: “Here are ellipsis [Tab]” which is transformed into: “Here are …”, but the problem is extra space in order for snippets like ‘ellipsis’ to be parsed since we want: “Here are ellipsis…”

I’ve checked what is available for Atom and there is smart-quotes-plus package where one can enter text by using some specific markup and then after pressing kbd-shortcut, the whole text is processed and converted into desired output.

However, I prefer to continue using ST3 and hopefully support ST4, prefer ST in any case over the other editor, but wonder if you have some suggestion how to write prose/articles/presentations and get proper markup with smart quotes, em/endashes, ellipsis etc.?

0 Likes

#2

[quote=“gour, post:1, topic:24702, full:true”]
Another plus was that the Python-powered static-site-generator which I use does have ability to post-process the content by applying smartypants Python package which is, unfortunately, unmaintained and does not e.g. handle emdash properly.[/quote]

After looking more closely, I’ve found out that smartypants can do it as we’d like to, but it’s simply not default and after submitting ticket, main developer added (kudos to him!) a new filter which uses correct smartypants’ behavior (aka oldshool), so for now, at least, the problem is solved when writing content for the Nikola static-site-generator. :wink:

0 Likes