typing primes with SmartyPants

[Aaron Swartz]

[If this is too off-topic for the list let me know, but I think it's 
relevant since it's the syntax most will be using with Markdown.]

 From the SmartyPants readme:

> This is useful, for example, when you want to use straight quotes as
> foot and inch marks: 6\'2\" tall; a 17\" iMac.

These are actually supposed to be prime characters. It would be nice to 
have a way to easily type the correct characters, without memorizing 
their HTML numbers. The same is true of right quotes when you want to 
write 'twas and suchly. Any suggestions? Maybe things like 
&rightQuote;,  ′, and &doublePrime; can be converted to their 
proper numbers. (Although those are pretty ugly...hopefully someone has 
a better proposal.)

Also, should these backslashed characters really be converted into 
escaped entities instead of just not converted? The only case where I 
can see this being useful is if you run something through SmartyPants 
twice, but that doesn't seem likely. (What does stupefy do with these? 
If it doesn't convert them, then the result isn't particularly stupid. 
If it does, then information is lost because of smartified again 
they'll become smart when they should be escaped. If it smarty-escapes 
them, that looks very weird.)

-- 
Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/