Smarty Pants: Smart typographic punctuation

Working for 1.1.6.0 to 1.1.6.4
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This page provides instructions on how to install a 3rd party formatting engine for smart typographic punctuation in WikkaWiki

 


The functionality

PHP SmartyPants is a port to PHP (written by Michel Fortin) of the original SmartyPants written in Perl by John Gruber. SmartyPants is a free web publishing tool that translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities. SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

SmartyPants does not modify characters within <pre>, <code>, <kbd>, or <script> tag blocks. Typically, these tags are used to display text where smart quotes and other "smart punctuation" would not be appropriate, such as source code or example markup.

Known issues
(from: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/)
One situation in which quotes will get curled the wrong way is when apostrophes are used at the start of leading contractions. For example:
’Twas the night before Christmas.
In the case above, SmartyPants will turn the apostrophe into an opening single-quote, when in fact it should be a closing one. I don't think this problem can be solved in the general case - every word processor I've tried gets this wrong as well. In such cases, it's best to use the proper HTML entity for closing single-quotes by hand.

Installing SmartyPants in Wikka is straightforward and it only requires setting some configuration options in the original code.

The steps


1. Get the code
Download the latest version of http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/

2. Copy it in the wikka directory
Unzip the SmartyPants folder and move it into /3rdparty/plugins

3. Modify the Wikka configuration file
Add the following lines to wikka.config.php:

    "typography" => "1",
    "smartypants_path" => "3rdparty/plugins/smartypants",


Make sure the smartypants path matches the path to the folder in which smartypants.php can be found.

4. Create a Typography() method

Add the following function in wikka.php, for example right after the GeSHi_Highlight() function:

    function Typography($text)
    {
        if (($this->GetConfigValue('typography') == 1) && file_exists($this->GetConfigValue('smartypants_path').'/smartypants.php'))
        {
            include_once($this->GetConfigValue('smartypants_path').'/smartypants.php');
            $text = SmartyPants($text);
        }
        return $text;
    }


5. Modify the formatter

Open ./formatter/wakka.php, scroll to the end of the file and add the following line, immediately before echo $text;

$text = $this->Typography($text);


6. Set SmartyPants configuration options

In order to make SmartyPants consistently work with Wikka, you should set the following options in:
3rdparty/plugins/smartypants/smartypants.php

  1. # Globals:
  2. $sp_tags_to_skip = '<(/?)(?:pre|code|kbd|script|math|form)[\s>]';


Make sure the $sp_tags_to_skip pattern contains form if you don't want punctuation to be parsed within forms. This is needed in case your Wikka runs beta extensions like GrabCodeHandler or MySkin, WikkaSkinEditor or WikkaSkinSelector.

That's all folks...


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