How typography normalizer works
Typewriters had one of each character, so plain-text files inherited straight quotes ("), single quotes and apostrophes ('), hyphens (-) and three dots (...) — but proper typography uses different characters: opening and closing curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’), an en dash for ranges and asides, an em dash for sentence-level breaks, and a single ellipsis character (…) instead of three periods. This tool swaps the straight ASCII versions for the typographic ones, the same transformation word processors call smart quotes or smart punctuation.
The choices are made with position-aware heuristics. A double quote that starts the text or follows whitespace or an opening bracket becomes an opening quote (“); one that follows a letter becomes a closing quote (”). An apostrophe after a letter is treated as a contraction or possessive and becomes ’ (don’t, dogs’); after whitespace it becomes an opening single quote (‘). A run of two or more hyphens becomes an em dash (—), and a lone hyphen surrounded by spaces becomes an en dash (–) — the spaced form used in many style guides.
Everything runs live in your browser: paste, review the change counts, and copy or keep typing. Use it on finished prose — articles, newsletters, book chapters, marketing copy — where typographic detail matters. It is deliberately conservative: it never reorders text or touches characters inside numbers such as hyphenated phone numbers. For broader cleanup before publishing, the whitespace trimmer and the find-and-replace tool pair well with this one.