Obsidian Smart Typography

If you’ve been following this website for a while, you’ll know I’m a stickler for typographic details. So I was relieved to find Smart Typography, an Obsidian plugin that does to typography what any app should when you’re writing prose.

Since I started using Obsidian, its straight quotes and apostrophes have been nagging me. This plugin by Matthew Meyers fixes them as you type:

  • "" becomes “curly double quotes”
  • '' becomes ‘curly single quotes’, and apostrophes are no longer straight
  • ... becomes an ellipsis…
  • -- becomes an en dash (–), and one more hyphen turns it into an em dash (—)
  • -> and <- become arrows (→ and ←), and 1/2 becomes ½

Any change can be undone with a single backspace, so it stays out of the way when you actually need a straight quote or two hyphens. Your Markdown files keep the proper characters, too—wherever you take them next.