SmartyPants and dashes

Fletcher T. Penney fletcher at fletcherpenney.net
Tue Oct 28 13:16:42 EDT 2014


FWIW, MultiMarkdown has always used `--` as en-dash, and `---` as 
em-dash, and I have never (to my recollection) had anyone contact me 
about it.

As a user, I would be quite confused trying to remember that the shorter 
abbreviation represents the longer dash, and vice-versa.  That seems 
very "anti-Markdown".

F-

On 10/28/14, 12:54 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
> Le 28-oct.-2014 à 12:06, Virgil Arrington <cuyfalls at hotmail.com> a écrit :
>
>> There appears to be either confusion or disagreement in the Markdown/SmartyPants world as to how to create typographic dashes. Is there any way that the developers can come together on this very small part of the Markdown world
>
> SmartyPants, the original by John Gruber, has a configuration string that lets you configure it the way you like. You are right that the default configuration does not do anything with `---` (hence why it sees it as an em dash followed by a hyphen).
>
> The configuration string is only documented in the code, but it's quite simple:
>
> 	#
> 	# Parser attributes:
> 	# 0 : do nothing
> 	# 1 : set all
> 	# 2 : set all, using old school en- and em- dash shortcuts
> 	# 3 : set all, using inverted old school en and em- dash shortcuts
> 	#
> 	# q : quotes
> 	# b : backtick quotes (``double'' only)
> 	# B : backtick quotes (``double'' and `single')
> 	# d : dashes
> 	# D : old school dashes
> 	# i : inverted old school dashes
> 	# e : ellipses
> 	# w : convert " entities to " for Dreamweaver users
> 	#
>
> Looks to me like other implementations are using a different configuration by default.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net


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