Question

I’m interested in microtypography issues on the web.

I want a tool to fix:

• Quotes
  • “ (“) opening quote (instead of “)
  • ” (”) closing quote (instead of “)
• Apostrophe
  • ’ (’) apostrophe (instead of ‘)
• Dashes and Hyphens
  • – (– or –) en dash, used for ranges, e.g. “13–15 November” (instead of -)
  • — (— or —) em dash, used for change of thought, e.g. “Star Wars is—as everyone knows—amazing.” (instead of -, or –)
• Ellipsis
  • … (… or …) horizontal ellipsis, used to indicate an omission or a pause (instead of …)
• And more \o/

All those fixes depend on the content language. In French, for example, we must add a insecable (non-breaking) space before every composed glyph (:, ;, …, ?, !, …), and our quotes are « like this ».

There are many constraints for such a tool:

• it must not edit any HTML inside protected tags (pre, code…)
• it must be fast (used on a CMS output)
• it must not break the HTML
• and so on.

There already are some tools on the market:

• http://michelf.ca/projects/php-smartypants/typographer/
• http://kingdesk.com/projects/php-typography/
• http://code.google.com/p/typogrify/

They are all more or less based on SmartyPants, a 2005 lib, not tested, not documented, parsing HTML manually and not dealing with other rules than English. Hell no.

So my questions are:

• Do you know of any decent tool like this?
• How can I do it? I already have a POC using DomCrawler but I’m not convinced. What’s the best way to parse and edit HTML in PHP?

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Edit July 2013: I have developed JoliTypo from the tests and expertise I gained with this issue. No existing lib was doing what I wanted to do.

Answer 1

My somewhat-friend Sean built something that I use for this purpose quite often. You can view the demo here: http://files.seancoates.com/lexentity/ he blogged about it here: http://seancoates.com/blogs/lexentity and you can grab the source here: https://github.com/scoates/lexentity

It might not meet your full language needs, but it’s a start with English.