It just occurred to me that if we are encoding our HTML pages in UTF-8 to
handle multiple languages and using web fonts with multilanguage support,
shouldn't we be able to directly insert the simple apostrophe, ellipsis, and
em-dash?
RubyPants-Unicode is a Ruby port of the smart-quotes library SmartyPants that
outputs
unicode characters (UTF-8) instead of HTML entities.
The original "SmartyPants" is a free web publishing plug-in for
Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII
punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML
entities.