Global Moxie

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.

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.