I was fid­dling with the Evans site this evening — adding a post about dona­tions, etc — and came across this post, which made ref­er­ence to the wp-Typography plu­gin. I installed it on the Evans site and had a look.  I must say, I’m impressed.

It allows for hyphen­ation, for one thing; it also han­dles wid­ows and orphans, some­thing that I vaguely under­stand.  More impres­sively — at least to me — it also han­dles “smart” quotes prop­erly.  Smartly, in fact.

This is a buga­boo of long stand­ing for me; I find it irri­tat­ing to see con­trac­tions like ’tis start­ing with an open­ing sin­gle quote rather than a proper apos­tro­phe.  This plu­gin seems to solve it.  (If “’tis” is spelled right in this post, it’s thanks to the plugin.)

Pedan­tic? It sure is.  But we all have our pet peeves, & for what­ever rea­son, improper punc­tu­a­tion is one of mine.  And I’m glad to have stum­bled across a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion to the problem.

Update: I see from the notes on the theme I’m using that wp-Typography is in the Rec­om­mended Plu­g­ins list. I thought sounded vaguely familiar…