Typographic Substitutions

TypeMetal automatically beautifies your punctuation in the flow of normal text, by performing certain typographic substitutions as you type.

• Straight 'single' and "double" quotes are replaced by appropriately paired ‘single’ and “double” quotes.
• Straight apostrophes are replaced by a single curly apostrophe.
• Double dashes are replaced by a long dash.
• (c) is replaced by the © symbol, and other similar substitutions are performed.

All of this happens automatically as you type, paste, and drop, without your having to ask for them explicitly, or remember the appropriate Unicode values or HTML entity names.

TypeMetal suppresses these substitutions inside of <code>, <kbd>, <samp>, and <var> elements, where it’s presumed you want exactly the characters you type — because you’re typing some program source code, for example.

If you encounter another context where you don’t want typographic substitutions performed, you can type the content into a temporary <code> element, then unwrap the <code> element when you’re done typing the desired content.