This is a classic, of course, but I decided to post something about each site I link to. This is probably the first article I read on ALA site:
The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)
And for the reference, some of the character codes from the article:
- – (– en dash is used to indicate a range of just about anything, etc.)
- — (— em dash is used to indicate a sudden break in thought, etc.)
- ‘ (‘ opening single quote)
- ’ (’ closing single quote or an apostrophe)
- “ (“ opening double quote)
- ” (” closing double quote)
The first version of this post had a silly statement about WordPress needing some tool to help with entering the proper codes for some of these special characters. Well, thanks to a comment from Matt, I know better now 🙂
WordPress actually creates those entities automatically using the Texturize engine. So just type normal text and your apostrophes, double- and triple-hypens, and elipsies should be transformed. Enjoy!
Cool, thank you. One note though – in another post I wrote about an HTML attribute, and I typed plain quotes. Of course, Texturize had no way of telling that I did not want any transformations in this case. However, it only transformed the second quote into a curly one. I worked around this by using " for plain quotes.