Typogrify Python Package

Typogrify Python package is automatically called within Pelican when the setting TYPOGRIFY is true. The typogrify function is called in Readers.read_file method of readers.py file. The function acts as a filter and the code looks like this.

content, metadata = read(filename)
if setting['TYPOGRIFY']:
    from typogrify.filters import typogrify
    content = typogrify(content)
    metadata['title'] = typogrify(metadata['title'])
    metadata['summary'] = typogrify(metadata['summary']) 

The typogrify function calls other 5 filters in the package: amp, smartypants, caps, initial_quotes, and widont. The documentation on github is clear on what amp, caps, and initial_quotes do.

The smartypants filter is the most important one in Typogrify package. It is a separate Python package, which is a port of SmartyPants Perl program written by John Gruber (who is known as the inventor of the Markdown language). The smartypants documentation on github has information on how to use the Python package. The documentation on John Gruber’s website is more clear on what the program does.

SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

• Straight quotes (" and') into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Dashes (“--” and “---“) into en- and em-dash entities
• Three consecutive dots (“...“) into an ellipsis entity

The widont filter is also interesting. It is “based on Shaun Inman’s PHP utility of the same name, replaces the space between the last two words in a string with   to avoid a final line of text with only one word”. I do not need this filter for this blog site, so I write a short Pelican plugin to remove the widont filter. Here is the code.

from pelican import logger
from pelican import signals

from typogrify import filters
from typogrify.filters import process_ignores, applyfilters

def init_rmwidont(sender):
    logger.debug('Init rmwidont Plugin')

def register():
    signals.initialized.connect(init_rmwidont)

    def typogrify(text, ignore_tags=None):
        section_list = process_ignores(text, ignore_tags)
        rendered_text = ""
        for text_item, should_process in section_list:
            if should_process:
                rendered_text += applyfilters(text_item)
            else:
                rendered_text += text_item
        ## Remove widont here 
        return rendered_text # widont(rendered_text)

    filters.typogrify = typogrify