Smarty Pants: More Unicode Characters

[John Gruber]

Christoph Freitag <mail at christoph-freitag.de> wrote on 11/5/05 at 9:46 PM:


> even if this is not new at all I would nevertheless like to put forward 

> my list of unicode character substitutions that I would like to see 

> implemented in a future version of Smarty Pants:

> 

> you type   | output           | Unicode

> -----------|----------------|---------

> (c), (C)   |   ©          | 00A9

> (P), (p)   |   ℗          | 2117

> (tm)       |   ™          | 2122

> (R), (r)   |   ®          | 00AE


These are somewhat reasonable, and several other people have
requested support for them previously. I'm a little loathe to add
support for them to SmartyPants, however, because at least on a Mac,
it's rather easy to type them manually:

Option-G: ©
Option-R: ®
Option-2: ™

Although I'll admit I don't know, offhand, the shortcut for ℗.



> (+)        |   ⊕          | 2295

> (/)        |   ∅          | 2300

> (x)        |   ⊗          | 2297

> (.)        |   ⊙          | 2299


These strike me as pretty obscure.




> :), :-)    |   ☺          | 263a

> :(, :-(    |   ☹              | 2639


SmartyPants will never support smileys. Someone else should create
SmileyPants if they want auto-smileys.



> ->           | (configurable) | 2192 (e.g.)


My private build of SmartyPants 1.6 supports the following
transformations:

->  &rarr;
<-  &larr;



> =>         | (configurable)   | 2102 (e.g.)

> <=>          |   ⇔            | 2104

>  >=         |   ≥         | 2265

> <=         |   ≤          | 2264


Maybe, especially for `>=` and `<=`.



> /=         |   ≠          | 2260


I'm not sure about this.



> 1/2        |   ½          | 00BD

> 1/3        |   ⅓              | 2153

> 2/3        |   ⅔              | 2154

> 1/4        |   ¼          | 00BC

> 3/4        |   ¾          | 00BE


I don't like the idea of supporting Unicode fractions, because then you're limited to the specific fractions with their own glyphs. If

    1/4

works, then why shouldn't the user expect

    5/33

to work as well?



> It would be best if the user could specifiy these substitutions in a 

> definition table at the top of the script (or maybe in an external 

> file). This is also because I am not so sure about enclosed numerals, 

> like (1) -> ➀. If the user could define that when needed ... fine!


Some sort of configuration table would be nice for advanced users --
those who want to use SmartyPants more as an API. But there need to
be a very reasonable and usable set of defaults.

-J.G.