Typography Fixer

Keyboards have no keys for most typographic characters, so writers improvise: two hyphens for a dash, three dots for an ellipsis, a letter x for multiplication, (c) for the copyright sign. In print and on a polished website these stand-ins look amateurish. This fixer replaces them with the proper characters in one pass, with safeguards so it never damages dates, phone numbers, web addresses or code.

Dashes

English uses three horizontal lines. The hyphen (-) joins words such as well-known. The en dash (–) marks ranges such as 10–20 or Monday–Friday, and in British style it is the sentence dash, with spaces around it. The em dash (—) is the American sentence dash, usually without spaces. The fixer turns double hyphens into em dashes, turns a hyphen with spaces around it into the sentence dash of the style you choose, and turns number ranges into en dashes.

Ranges that are not ranges

Not every number-hyphen-number is a range. Phone numbers (555-0123), ISO dates (2026-03-14), part numbers and season labels (2025-26) must stay as they are. The range rule only applies when the first number is smaller than the second and the pair is not part of a longer hyphenated number, so 10-20 becomes 10–20 while 555-0123 and 2026-03-14 are untouched.

Ellipsis, symbols and signs

Three full stops become a single ellipsis character (…), which spaces correctly and never breaks across lines. (c), (r) and (tm) become ©, ® and ™. Dimensions such as 1920x1080 get a true multiplication sign, and a hyphen in front of a number, as in “-5 °C”, becomes a minus sign. Optional rules turn 1/2, 1/4 and 3/4 into ½, ¼ and ¾ when they stand alone (not in dates like 1/2/2026).

Spaces

Double spaces after a full stop, a typewriter habit, become single spaces. The optional unit rule puts a no-break space between a number and its unit — 10 kg, 5 km, 20 °C, 8 GB — so the two never end up on different lines.

Quotes

The smart quotes toggle converts straight quotes and apostrophes to typographic ones in English style, with primes for feet and inches. For other languages’ quotation marks, use the Smart Quotes Converter.

What is protected

Web addresses (where double hyphens and x are meaningful) and code in backticks or fenced blocks are set aside before the rules run and restored afterwards, so Markdown documentation is safe to process.

A worked example

The sample “Wait… the meeting is on pages 10-20 of the report – not 30-40. The screen is 1920x1080 and it’s -5 °C outside.” becomes “Wait… the meeting is on pages 10–20 of the report—not 30–40. The screen is 1920×1080 and it’s −5 °C outside.” Each rule’s count appears next to it, so you can see what changed.

Workflow tips

Run the fixer once on the final text, after editing, and review the counts: an unexpectedly high number for one rule is a sign to check those changes. Keep source code, data and URLs out of the text you fix, or wrap code in backticks. For French or German texts, use the Smart Quotes Converter for language-specific quotation marks.

Related tools

Choose quotation marks for other languages with the Smart Quotes Converter, clean spacing and line breaks with the Text Cleaner, see hidden spaces with the Whitespace Visualizer, or count characters with the Character Counter.