Jekyll-Pants is a Jekyll plugin to convert plain ASCII punctuation to typographic punctuation HTML entities. It relies on RubyPants which is a Ruby port of the smart-quotes library SmartyPants.
| Input | Output | Rendered |
|---|---|---|
Here's an example--as you can see... |
Here’s an example—as you can see… |
Here’s an example—as you can see… |
This plugin exists because the default Jekyll support for smart quotes is limited to:
-
Markdown parsed by kramdown (see note below for how to disable kramdown's quoting in favor of jekyll-pants).
-
The smartify filter which is actually another way to invoke kramdown's markdown processor, so it doesn't work as desired on HTML.
Unlike the built-in solutions, jekyll-pants works on HTML, making it suitable for applying typographic punctuation to an entire site of hand-authored HTML pages.
Add jekyll-pants to your site's Gemfile in the :jekyll-plugins group and run
bundle to install and update Gemfile.lock:
group :jekyll_plugins do
gem "jekyll-pants"
endIn your base layout, filter the content through the pants filter:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
{{content|pants}}
</body>
</html>Since RubyPants parses HTML tags, this will apply typographic quoting, dashes
and ellipses to text content, but will ignore preformatted text in <pre> and <script>.
By default, this plugin invokes RubyPants with no options, so RubyPants runs in its default mode which is "old-school." In old-school mode, double-dash translates to an en-dash and triple-dash translates to an em-dash.
This can be modified in Jekyll's _config.yml under the pants key, for
example:
pants:
options: [1, 'prevent_breaks']For the available options, see https://github.com/jmcnevin/rubypants/blob/master/lib/rubypants/core.rb
Jekyll's default markdown processor is kramdown, and by default kramdown applies smart quoting and typographic substitutions. Its algorithm works a little differently from RubyPants which means that you'll get mixed results with content coming from both markdown and HTML sources.
Jekyll-Pants supplies a parser subclass as
recommended by kramdown's author.
The subclass is called Pantsdown and removes the :smart_quotes and
:typographic_syms span parsers from the list.
To use this subclass and thereby defer to RubyPants for
quotes, dashes and ellipses, put the following in your _config.yml:
kramdown:
input: Pantsdown