Smart Typography

MultiMarkdown incorporates John Gruber’s SmartyPants tool in addition to the core Markdown functionality. This program converts “plain” punctuation into “smarter” typographic punctuation.

Just like the original, MultiMarkdown converts:

• Straight quotes (" and ') into “curly” quotes
• Backticks-style quotes (``this'') into “curly” quotes
• Dashes (-- and ---) into en- and em- dashes
• Three dots (...) become an ellipsis

MultiMarkdown also includes support for quotes styles other than English (the default). Use the quotes language metadata to choose:

• dutch (nl)
• german(de)
• germanguillemets
• french(fr)
• swedish(sv)

This feature is enabled by default, but is disabled in compatibility mode, since it is not part of the original Markdown. You can also use the smart and nosmart command line options to control this feature.