For those who don’t know, Instiki is a wiki clone based on Ruby on Rails. Very easy to install and use. One virtue of Instiki is that it has the option of using Markdown, a lightweight markup language. (Or is it?). It can be used locally and is a handy way to organize notes.

Smartypants is a companion project to Markdown. It translates ASCII punctuation characters into ‘smart’ typographic punctuation. (After all, you want to be typographically correct, don’t you?)

The first problem is that the Instiki.org site seems no longer to exist. I was worried that Instiki was no more. Fortunately, after some searching, I found that Instiki can be downloaded here. There are a number of download options. The easiest for OS X users is instiki-0.10.2.dmg. Mount the dmg and drag Instiki.app to your Applications folder and your done.

You don’t need Ruby or Rails installed to run Instiki.app, all these files are contained locally. But that means you need to access the contents of Instiki.app to make Dr. Drang’s modifications. The file bluecloth_tweaked.rb can be found in the following directory:

/Applications/Instiki.app/Contents/Resources/rb_src/lib

Open that file in your favorite text editor and add

require 'rubypants'

near the top of the file with the other require lines. Towards the bottom of the to_html method add either:

text = RubyPants.new( text, 1).to_html()   

or:

text = RubyPants.new( text ).to_html()   

The former will give you em dashes with two hyphens. The latter will give you em dashes with three hyphens. I prefer the latter convention to the former and not just because it is the TeX convention. On the latter convention two hyphens gives you en dashes, whereas the former convention cannot represent these. And since hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are progressively longer, it makes sense that they be represented by one, two, and three consecutive hypens respectively

One more modification is necessary. You need to install RubyPants in the the same directory as bluecloth_tweaked.rb. RubyPants is the Ruby implementation of SmartyPants. It can be downloaded here. Untar the file by double clicking it, and move the file rubypants.rb to:

/Applications/Instiki.app/Contents/Resources/rb_src/lib

Restart Instiki.app and now all your notes will be typographically correct. Thanks Dr. Drang!