Macros in Movable Type
Comments: 6
I have an unspeakable envy of people like Brad Choate whose MTMacros allows you to run macros through Movable Type — although I haven’t been able to get it working yet (my fault, I’m sure).
I followed Mark Pilgrim’s instructions (he even very kindly makes his macro file available) but am getting mixed results. I’m in no condition today to troubleshoot anything, so it’ll have to wait.
The main reason I’m interested in MTMacros is that it should enable us to type regular straight quotes and apostrophes which will be converted to curly quotes and proper apostrophes when the page is rendered, thus saving us from entering HTML entities manually.
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Posted to The Good • 2002.08.20 (Tue) • 15:03
Comments
Posted by tomas 2002.08.04, 03:04
FilmCritic.com disagrees: http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/2a460f93626cd4678625624c007f2b46/11a1e55c2b08179588256bf90019445c?OpenDocument
Whatever anyone says, I’m hesitant to believe that Soderbergh can make a bad movie.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2002.08.04, 06:00
Well, if one believes the New Yorker, he did.
Posted by Mike Steinbaugh 2002.08.21, 03:20
I played around with the macro feature as well and I managed to get at least the acronym system working. So far I’m not sure about getting curly quotes to work but if I work on it a little more I’m sure it will come to me.
Posted by jh 2002.08.21, 15:24
I’d really appreciate it if you let me know how it goes for you. I found that apostrophes in contactions like “don’t” would substitute properly, but that quotes at either end of a string wouldn’t. Incorrect apostrophes don’t really bother me; I don’t trouble myself to manually replace now - just quotes, elipses and dashes. Curly quote substitution is the holy grail. I’m sick of typing decimal replacement strings!
I edited the acronym replacements out of Pilgrim’s macros file. While there are probably sound usability reasons for employing this method, my feeling is that correct ‘acronym handling’ should be a function of the writer, not the software. As a rule I try to give the fully expanded phrase first, perhaps with its acronym in parentheses following, and then use the acronym after that. Obvious ones like HTML, NATO and UN don’t require the full treatment.
One technical problem with automatic acronym tagging concerns context and pluralities. For example, is “WA” Western Australia or Washington State? It’s both, of course, depending on context but the macros in their current incarnation can’t tell.
Posted by Ian 2002.08.25, 22:13
Any updates on getting apostrophes/smart quotes to work?
Posted by jh 2002.08.27, 17:36
Hi, Ian.
No updates, I’m afraid, as I’ve been laid up with a cold (or something) and then caught up installing Jaguar and playing aorund with that. I’m no grep-master by any stretch of the imagination so the macros are going to be tricky for me to troubleshoot by myself. I don’t want to give up though and will have another look over the weekend when we get back from a quick trip to the countryside we’ve got planned.
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