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…