Personally I can’t stand widows and orphans and I’ve encountered a number of designers that pay no attention to them, some of them don’t even know what they are. A shame really. Anyway, one thing I don’t like about WordPress is how there’s almost no way to easily control the typography of each post. In comes Typogrify, a plug-in originally created by Christian Metts for Django and ported to WP by Hamish. It’s an excellent little plug-in that includes the Smartypants and Widont engines.

Here’s what it can do:

– Prevents text “widows”.

– Run text through SmartyPants.

– Wrap initial quotes (and French style (Guillemets) quotes) in class=’dquo’ or class=’quo’ depending on if they are single or double.

– Wrap ampersands in class=’amp’.

– Wrap multiple adjacent capital letters in class=’caps’.

– Add a thinspace before and after en and em dashes.

– And of course it has a function to do all of the above.

I love the damn thing and it will make my life more fulfilling. If you run a WP blog download the plug-in so we can do away with Widows & Orphans once and for all!

Via I Love Typography