# SmartyPants
Easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities.
The following text about what is SmartyPants and how to use it is from
the original [SmartyPants.pl][] project.
[SmartyPants.pl]:https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
by John Gruber
SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom,
and BBEdit. that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters
into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities. SmartyPants can also
be invoked as a standalone Perl script. smartypants.js is JavaScript
version of Smartypants.pl. Provides the translate feature and supports
output UTF-8 character instead of HTML entity.
SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:
* Straight quotes (`"` and `'`) into "curly" quote HTML entities
* Backtick-style quotes (` ``like this'' `) into "curly" quote HTML
entities
* Dashes (`--` and `---`) into en- and em-dash entities
* Three consecutive dots (`...`) into an ellipsis entity
This means you can write, edit, and save your posts using plain old
ASCII straight quotes, plain dashes, and plain dots, but your published
posts (and final HTML output) will appear with smart quotes, em-dashes,
and proper ellipses.
SmartyPants does not modify characters within `
`, ``,
``, or `