Announcing SmartyPants.NET

SmartyPants is another interesting project run by John Gruber, the author of Markdown. SmartyPants is very popular, and the two are often used in tandem. With this in mind I wanted to port both to C#.

In John’s own words,

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.

…

This means you can write, edit, and save your posts using plain old ASCII straight quotes, plain dashes, and plain dots, but your published posts (and final HTML output) will appear with smart quotes, em-dashes, and proper ellipses.

Likewise, its C# counterpart can be used for blogs, sites, etc, written in ASP.NET.

Note: the beauty of .NET managed code is that you may reference my assembly, written in C#, from any other managed language, such as VB.NET.

From now on you’ll be able to download both Markdown and SmartyPants for .NET together along with a "driver"—the same one I use on in my Tools section. The versioning and licensing reflect those of the original author.

Happy coding!

Woo hoo! I was going to ask if you were planning on doing this. Donated again :).

Cheers,

Nick

Thank you so much for Markdown.NET and SmartyPants.NET.

I've just now downloaded them and added a test page to my application. Your components work very sweetly.

Many thanks for sharing these with the community. It's greatly appreciated.

Regards,
SomeNewKid

Was under the impression that SmartyPants would convert high-value ascii characters to their Html Entity equivalents? Does so for things like ... and -- but doesn't touch the other, more standard characters like ®, © and ™, which was what I was actually looking for. Or am I missing something here?

I wonder... John's online SmartyPants doesn't convert them either.

Ok, I just wasted several minutes on this website only to find there's not one single place to download either smartypants or markdown.

The link marked 'download both Markdown and Smartypants' simply sends you to an online example form where you can see them in action, but nowhere on this site can I find a download link at all. For smartypants there is a link to an external website that only provides the plugin for moveableType and other crappy off-the-shelf blogs. This site promotes these tools as something you can plug into an asp.net site, but then just provides a bunch of misleading links that lead to no download at all. What the heck?

The link that says "download..." points to a ZIP with both Markdown and SmartyPants.

2 hours ago there were no links to download anything but perl scripts. I see that, in response to my earlier post, you have now provided an actual download link that really does let you download the VS project.
Kudos to you for changing the site so there's now an actual download link. However, you get no kudos for failing to acknowledge that no such link existed earlier today.

Actually, it did. "Tools" was pointing to the download, and "download..." --- to Tools. :) I simply swapped them.