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What's Global Moxie?

Global Moxie specializes in mobile design strategy and user experience for a multiscreen world. We offer consulting services, training, and product-invention workshops to help creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites. We're based in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more.

On Shelves

Books by Josh Clark

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders

iWork ’09: The Mising Manual

Moxiemail

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How do I make Big Medium generate “curly quotes” and other typographic finery?

Question

How do I make Big Medium generate “curly quotes” and other typographic finery?

Answer

Use the SmartyPants plugin for Big Medium.

About SmartyPants

SmartyPants is a Perl plugin written by the oh-so-clever John Gruber. Originally designed for use with Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit, I've tweaked it to work with Big Medium, too.

When installed, the SmartyPants plugin for Big Medium adds the following transformations to your page content:

  • Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
  • Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
  • Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity

(Sorry, for now at least, the plugin does not transform the text of page/link titles, only to the body text of pages.)

To Install

Download the SmartyPants plugin for Big Medium.

SmartyPants for Big Medium 1.0 (8 KB)
Download the SmartyPants plugin (requires Big Medium 2.0b27 or later).

Unzip the download file to get SmartyPants.pl file. Upload this file to the plugins directory inside your site's moxiebin directory, making sure that your FTP client is set to "plain text" (or "ASCII") mode.

Rebuild all pages to make Big Medium update the text of all of your current pages, and you're done.

Download Big Medium
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Blown Away

“I’m blown away by Josh Clark’s deep understanding of the iPhone user experience.”
—Jürgen Schweizer, founder of Cultured Code, maker of Things iPhone app

“It’s rare to find a person like Josh Clark who speaks so intently to the topic of interface design and mobile devices.”
—John Maeda, president of Rhode Island School of Design

“If you have time to read only one book on what makes apps successful, it is Tapworthy by Josh Clark.”
—Andreas Sjostrom, manager of mobile solutions, Sogeti

More praise for Tapworthy