Nicetype

Touch up copy by converting plain ASCII punctuation into “smart” Unicode equivalents. Transformations include:

• Straight to curly quotes.
• Hyphen-dashes to em and endashes
• Two, three or more dots to horizontal ellipsis

Please note these transforms are intended for English locales.

Nicetype is an ES6 port of the abandoned jsPrettify library.

While jsPrettify’s rules aren’t the most thorough—this is also its strength as it reduces false positives and possible conflicts with the original input’s style.

Installation

pnpm add @cactuslab/nicetype
npm install --save @cactuslab/nicetype

Usage

import nicetype from 'nicetype'

const exampleString = 'Fish \'n\' Chips';
console.log(nicetype.formatString(exampleString)); // 'Fish ’n’ Chips'

const exampleElement = document.createElement('div');
exampleElement.innerText = exampleString;
nicetype.formatElement(exampleElement, {
  // exclusionAttribute: String,
  // tagNameExclusions: []
}); // HTMLElement or Node of type: TEXT_NODE

API

nicetype.formatString(string)

Returns transformed string

Parameters

• string: String to transform

nicetype.formatElement(element, options)

Applies transformations to an element and its childrens’ text nodes. If an element has the exclusionAttribute or is of a tagName listed in tagNameExclusions—that branch’s replacement will stop.

Parameters

• element: An HTMLElement

• options: Optional Object for customising defaults

  {
    exclusionAttribute: 'data-nicetype-disable',
    tagNameExclusions: ['base', 'command', 'link', 'meta', 'noscript', 'script', 'style', 'title', 'audio', 'br', 'code', 'command', 'datalist', 'embed', 'hr', 'iframe', 'img', 'input', 'kbd', 'keygen', 'map', 'math', 'meter', 'object', 'output', 'picture', 'progress', 'ruby', 'samp', 'script', 'select', 'svg', 'template', 'textarea', 'video', 'wbr', 'area', 'audio', 'canvas', 'embed', 'iframe', 'img', 'math', 'object', 'picture', 'svg', 'video', 'input', 'keygen', 'label', 'meter', 'object', 'output', 'progress', 'select', 'textarea', 'script', 'template']
  }

Roadmap

• Non-breaking space: Short words/widow prevention
• Expose advanced/opinionated dash options…, or remove entirely?
• TypeScript

Development/Builds

nvm use
pnpm install

See Also

• string-apostrophes (comparison)
• textr
• Richtypo (node.js)
• Typopo