Smart Typography Plugin (curly quotes, em dashes, ellipses)

Greetings, everyone! I’ve just released a simple, but handy plugin that (currently) converts:

  • "" to “” - curly double quotes
  • '' to ‘’ - curly single quotes
  • -- to — - em dash
  • ... to - ellipsis

as you type. Any automatic changes can be undone by pressing backspace.

I hope to expand this to support the conventions of other languages. You can help me out with this by submitting an issue here, telling me what these conventions are: Issues · mgmeyers/obsidian-smart-typography · GitHub



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Thank you!!!

I was just wishing for this exact thing on Sunday night!

Excellent. I particularly like the quotes part, even if some themes render the curly quotes as horrible apostrophe-type (back)ticks.

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Is that the theme? Or maybe the font?

@austin : it’s a plug-in, will work with any theme.

I got that. I was saying that the style of quotation marks is different with each typeface. The themes don’t render curly quotes as horrible apostrophe-type (back)ticks. The font does. The theme just displays the font.

So, where I’m going is, if you like your font but not the curly quotes, the odds are high that you can find a similar font with the type of curly quote you like.

@austin : sorry for the misunderstanding and my ignorance. You are absolutely right that it is in fact a font issue, NOT a theme issue.

It so happens that when I was looking into this yesterday I found out that by simply changing the font of the theme I am using the curly quotes were rendered where they had not before.

BTW, I did not realize your 1st reply was to me. Might be an idea to always add @person in your reply. Just a thought.

@mgmeyers Thank you so much. Exactly what I needed.

The latest update has added better dash rules: Two dashes (–) will be converted to an en-dash (–). And en-dash followed by a dash will be converted to and em-dash (—). An em-dash followed by a dash will be converted into three dashes (—)

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This is great, thanks for building it! Is it possible to run this on an existing file, i.e. perform a kind of find & replace?

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Not at the moment. This is a bit more difficult than converting typography in real time. I’ll have to look into the best way to do this.

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v1.0.5 has been released. You can now customize which open/close quote characters are used

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@mgmeyers : very useful. Many thanks.

Hello!

Great plugin - and thank you for sharing!

For finding update existing files, would it be sufficient to find and replace (space) (double-quote) (non-space) with (space) (curly-quote) (non-space) outside of code regions (such as frontmatter, latex etc…)?

Hi! I’m new to Obsidian, but was excited to see this plugin as, uh, en dashes are life. But it doesn’t work with the android app I’m using on my chromebook, unfortunately. Is there an easy way to make it compatible, or some other way around it that you know of?

Thanks!

Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t work on mobile yet. It’s on my todo list, however, so should be implemented shortly!

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Excellent, thanks! I got the linux version working on my chromebook, but it’d still be handy to have those pesky en dashes on my phone. Thanks again.

Dropping by to say thanks! This increases the value of Obsidian.

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I’ve installed version 1.0.8 and I can’t find the options section to customise which characters are changed. Has this been removed or am I looking in the wrong place?

Thank you for your work on this!