Symphony.

I'm a big type nerd and when I saw Jeff Croft announce Typogrify for Django I got excited. It was now almost possible to do all the proper type treatments I had gotten used to doing in print -- on the Web. Things like, smart quotes, em dashes, small caps and hanging punctuation!

Heres an example.

Now it's been converted to PHP as a Wordpress plugin, so a Symphony extension can't be too far off.

But then I remember 2shed's nice widon't XSLT template and started to wonder if an extension is even needed.

So, what would be the best way to approach adding the Typogrify niceties to a Symphony site? Through an extension like Markdown, thorough XSLT Utilities or maybe a bit of both?

Which one is more efficient? Can I format a text input, or is formatting only allowed on a text area?

Any other type nerds out there interested in this sort of thing?

I had been a type freak for a while, but haven't really done too much in the past few years. I still critique kerning whenever I see something off in a publication though, wondering what the designer was thinking.

anyhow, you might find this thread on the other forum of interest to you, MrBlank:

http://symphony21.com/forum/discussions/1201/1/#position-11

The info could help, it might not. It's worth a look though. (You can thank Allen for these tidbits).

Thanks, wtdtan. I saw that post before and I'm fairly certain that I could replicate most of what Typogrify does using the Markdown/Smartypants extension and XSLT. I'm just curious if the XSLT would be as fast as PHP in applying the filters in regards to server processing.

I guess to clarify what I was asking before since I wasn't very clear (sorry): Would it be worthwhile to create a Typogrify extension (like the Markdown one) or should I just apply the filters using XSLT?

Or is it just 6 one way and half-dozen the other?

I would think it would be better doing something like Markdown b/c once you publish, the formatting will take place right after you publish the entry. However, since the windows are based on your layout, this might not be the best way to do it since there are some variables thrown in there based on the layout, not to mention how text is displayed in different browsers and OSes.

have you seen dave's JS for splitting content into two columns? http://www.zastica.com/entries/creating-columns-with-javascript/

You know, since this is all about visual elements, why not use JavaScript for it? It would take the burden off of the server.

Something more to think about and learn. I know less about JS than I do PHP! :-)

While you could do this using Javascript, I'd recommend you not go down that path. My experience has shown that no matter how much things change, and how useful the features that your Javascript adds are - some twat will have it switched off for "security reasons".

I too wanted Typogrify for Symphony, so I thought this might help: http://symphony21.com/forum/discussions/150/1/

You rock, dude.