The Ligature Online Manual
Jan 9, 2009

Using The Punctuator

The Punctuator is a line of buttons used to insert typographically-correct punctuation entities into the text area below. If you hover your pointer over each button you'll see that it has an accesskey that you can use to insert text without having to click the button: for example, the accesskey for Italics is alt + I.

This is what each button means, in order of appearance. If a button 'wraps', it means that appropriate start/end marks are put at the beginning and end of selected text.

1. Boldface (wraps; XHTML-friendly; strongly emphasise)
2. Italicise (wraps; XHTML-friendly; emphasise)
3. Em Dash (a break in thought; a range without end)
4. En Dash (a range that ends; joining words that are already hyphenated [Open-Source–based, not Open-Source-based])
5. Single curly quotes (wraps; keyboard apostrophe is not a single quote)
6. Double curly quotes (wraps; keyboard double quote is not correct)
7. Ellipsis (three full-stops do not have the correct spacing and are too bold)
8. Apostrophe (keyboard apostrophe is not correct)
9. Ampersand (means 'and'; for showing character entity codes)
10. Less than–Greater than (wraps; for showing HTML code)
11. Paragraph (wraps; correct HTML code for starting and ending a new paragraph)
12. Carriage return (HTML code for starting a new line directly underneath the current one)
13. Hide From Parser (wraps; tells Ligature not to autolink the text between the Hide From Parser marks.)

The Punctuator requires Javascript to run.

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