Today I put a small hack in the single script that's called Oddmuse, on which this site runs. It was one of my TODOs for some weeks.
[bart@room wiki]$ diff wiki.cgi wiki_old.cgi 454,456d453 < $text =~ s/\-\-\-/–/g; < $text =~ s/\-\-/—/g; < $text =~ s/\\\-/-/g; [bart@room wiki]$
A hyphen with a backslash in front of it becomes a hyphen. Two hyphens dashes become an em-dash. Three hyphens become an en-dash. All as per this article. And the best thing is, this was all done in under 15 minutes, including skimming the article and adding this weblog entry.
There are loads of typograhical things bothering me, one of them being the em- and en-dash--this is now fixed, however other things like curly quotes, ellipsis and ligatures are still missing. I'd like a nice fi and an ij, for starters. And I can't do it the way it's done above, you only want them outputted, not have your input changed.
Note that this stuff has all long been fixed using TeX and related and still we have to miss it on the Web and "professional" word processing packages which have reached version "XP" or "2.0" and still look not-so-good.