### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2021, 9:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/1 "2021-03-07T21:18:10Z")
Might it be possible to tweak the current configuration settings around Markdown typographer (also known as “smart punctuation”) to _enable_ Unicode punctuation marks, like quotation marks and dashes, but disable (c), ™, and potentially other specialized glyphs of the kind?
I’m a lawyer. I advise on trademarks and copyrights all the time, including on Discourse forums. I have yet to advise anyone to revise a post to add a copyright or trademark symbol, and non-lawyers tend to massively overestimate how often they’re useful or necessary. On the flip side, I’ve edited more posts than I can count to try and trick the Markdown rendered into _not_ rendering the © symbol.
This comes up especially often in enumerated lists. For example:
> (a) apple
> (b) banana
> (c) copyright?
> (d) date
This enumeration style is _very_ common in laws, contracts, policies, and other formal writing influenced by legal style. It’s also a very common outline style. It was part of the “standard” outline style I was taught as a grade school student in the United States.
I see the current settings offer some flexibility around the _punctuation_, but not, as far as I can tell, any way to enable smart punctuation without enabling smart symbols.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2021, 9:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/2 "2021-03-07T21:57:15Z")
I don’t have strong feelings around this one, I feel like “needing” to type the copyright symbol is so rare that this shortcut can be pulled .. the balance of _extremely rare_ usefulness versus the fairly common (but unsightly) list (a) (b) `(c)` format .. I’m fine with removing this particular shortcut entirely @sam.
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2021, 10:21pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/3 "2021-03-07T22:21:30Z")
I’d also support just plain removing `(c)`.
It’s not like it’s hard to search “copyright symbol”, copy, and paste. Nerds can type `©`.
From a usability point of view, I’d have a list at all the expansions. I strongly suspect they’re more surprising than helpful.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2021, 10:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/4 "2021-03-07T22:32:34Z")
Right, for this one, the benefit (teeeeeny tiiiny) appears to outweigh the risk (a fair bit!).
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 4:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/5 "2021-03-08T04:50:03Z")
This is not looking that configurable, we would need to patch markdown.it to support this flexibility or just write our own prettify based off markdown.it.
>
Only trivial fix is just to turn off the whole feature.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 4:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/6 "2021-03-08T04:52:59Z")
Huh odd that it isn’t configurable at all. That’s a shame. So
`(c) (tm) (r) (p)` → (c) ™ (r) (p)
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 4:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/7 "2021-03-08T04:54:43Z")
The upside is that the engine is pretty configurable, we could turn off the rules in markdown.it, copy the code and implement our own replacements just like @Roman implemented → .
A few days of engineering in cleaning that up, also would be a shame to ship the same code twice, but kind of unavoidable if we are forking it.
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 5:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/8 "2021-03-08T05:25:58Z")
As of commit 7b8969ce5cb2edc54f2c1aa39a85a3a08076337d on markdown-it `master`, the relevant source file is `lib/rules_core/replacements.js` and the relevant test fixture is `test/fixtures/markdown-it/typographer.txt`.
All of the replacements are hard-coded. They include `(c)` → (c), `(tm)` → ™, `(r)` → (r), and `(p)` → (p), which are grouped as “scoped abbreviations”.
For what it’s worth, I don’t get `(p)` for §. That should almost certainly be ℗, the phonorecord symbol, instead.
I am going to poke at this for a few and see if I can’t come up with a patch that makes the “typographer” feature more configurable.
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### Author:  [@HAWK](https://meta.discourse.org/u/HAWK)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 5:29am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/9 "2021-03-08T05:29:18Z")
This drives me nuts as well. I hit it at least weekly.
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 5:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/10 "2021-03-08T05:34:53Z")
First, ancillary PR, fixing the interpretation of `(p)` and `(P)`: [Fix typographer interpretation of `(p)` by kemitchell · Pull Request #761 · markdown-it/markdown-it · GitHub](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it/pull/761)
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 6:41am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/11 "2021-03-08T06:41:43Z")
PR for switching off groups of replacements: [Configurable typographer by kemitchell · Pull Request #762 · markdown-it/markdown-it · GitHub](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it/pull/762)
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 7:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/12 "2021-03-08T07:03:23Z")
Maintainer’s highly responsive. He closes my PRs in a matter of minutes 😜
What I’m reading is that he’s very, very loathe to introduce any breaking changes, even in new major versions, even for things like `(P)` rendering as §. He’s also allergic to allowing `typographer: {A: true, B: false}`-style options, even where `typographer: true` remains functional, on account of perceived complexity.
I’m reading between lines, and he’s a Russian guy writing in English. But I get the feeling he sees markdown-it as baked.
With all gratitude, might be worth forking the impl, rewriting as ES Modules, and stripping out all the plugin-esque functionality that’s currently bundled, both linkification and replacements, including typographers’ punctuation replacements.
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### Author:  [@kemitchell](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kemitchell)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2021, 7:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/13 "2021-03-08T07:25:36Z")
Maintainer’s not interested in points about duplicate code in bundles without numbers. And not interested in even non-breaking changes to API that aren’t “required by 100% of users” or blocking plugin impls. That leads to something of a bind, since they’re shipping two very plugin-y submodules, for linkification and smart punctuation, that should really be in their own small npm packages under that philosophy. It happens.
For context, there have been significant releases to markdown-it in the fairly recent past. Notably a perf improvement from Alex Kocharin in November of last year.
To fix `(c)`, deal with `(p)`, and do whatever else we want to do with arrows and the like, the best bet’s probably to float a patch removing the linkification and smart punctuation submodules from the core and loading them instead as plugins in Discourse. Use a GitHub Action or a cron job to keep an eye on markdown-it master and attempt automatic rebasing. If the maintainer remains this conservative about changes, the patch should apply cleanly for a good long time. Unless they make a big leap like rewriting as ES Modules, rather than CommonJS.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 10, 2021, 10:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/14 "2021-03-10T22:27:31Z")
We discussed this internally and decided we are going to hard-fork typographer.
We will basically disable typographer in markdown.it and implement a copy in discourse. markdown.it is incredibly extensible, this is mostly “copy-and-paste”.
Once copy-and-paste is done we can add tests and customize and change some of the rules.
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### Author:  [@Lorthirk](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Lorthirk)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2021, 10:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/15 "2021-06-09T10:17:33Z")
Hey, sorry to bring up this discussion. Since I’m looking for a way to disable `... -> …`, I wanted to know if this feature somehow progressed, and if I can expect to somehow enable or disable individual rules in the future.
Thanks!
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2021, 10:19am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/16 "2021-06-09T10:19:31Z")
It is a site setting, just disable typographer
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### Author:  [@Lorthirk](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Lorthirk)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2021, 10:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/17 "2021-06-09T10:20:34Z")
Well, I tried that already, but apparently it’s not working. No matter if I enable or disable the typographer, the substitutions are always done (and, by the way, (c) doesn’t seem to work)
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2021, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/18 "2021-06-09T10:21:27Z")
You need to disable, then rebuild html on your desired posts
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2021, 6:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/19 "2021-07-07T06:01:25Z")
This is now very much complete 🎊
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2021, 6:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/smart-punctuation-without-ip-symbols/182423/20 "2021-07-07T06:01:28Z")