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Thanks for those suggestions. So, then, do you (or others) actually use those key combinations instead of ' and " while writing/typing? That seems like a fairly heavy re-working of a very low level muscle-memory process that would take me a long time to habit-change.

I don't use any of the software that Smartypants supports, but I just started playing with Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ yesterday, and it has a --smart flag, so that's probably what I'll go with.

As I also recently started trying to learn vim (it's hard), I might try this: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2005/10/smart_quotes_and_... too.

In case anyone else is in a similar position.



For my blogs, etc. I just process everything via Textile/SmartyPants/similar.

For other writing, I don't bother to insert proper quote marks, but usually use a proper dash.

BTW, Mac OS X since 10.6 can automatically replace quotes in any Cocoa textview, but I have it turned off.

The problem with "smart typography" is that is must be language-aware: quotes used in «Russian» are different from “English” and „German“ and »other« »styles»: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_...




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