Text Formatter

Smart quotes are typographically correct quotation marks that curve to indicate opening and closing positions: “ and ” for double quotes, ‘ and ’ for single quotes. Straight quotes (" and ') are ASCII characters that do not distinguish between opening and closing. Smart quotes are the standard in professionally typeset text -- books, magazines, well-designed websites. Straight quotes appear in text typed quickly or copied from a source that did not apply smart quote conversion. Converting to smart quotes is one of the quickest ways to make a piece of writing look more polished.

A hyphen (-) connects compound words: "well-known," "up-to-date." An en dash (–) indicates ranges: "pages 10–15," "Monday–Friday." An em dash (—) indicates a break in thought or an aside -- like this. The em dash is the most commonly misused: many writers substitute a double hyphen (--) because it is easier to type. This tool converts double hyphens to em dashes automatically. Most style guides recommend em dashes without surrounding spaces (word—word), though some use thin spaces. This tool adds spaces around em dashes ( word — word ) by default, which is the more readable convention for web text.

Double spaces after periods were a convention from the typewriter era, when monospace fonts made single spaces between sentences hard to read. Modern proportional fonts handle sentence spacing automatically, so a single space is the current standard. Many people who learned to type on a keyboard in the 1980s or 1990s still type two spaces after a period by habit. Copied text from older documents may also contain double spaces throughout. This tool collapses all sequences of multiple spaces into a single space without affecting line breaks.

An ellipsis (…) is a single Unicode character used to indicate omitted text or a trailing pause. Three dots (...) typed in sequence are three separate period characters, which is technically incorrect typography and can cause line-breaking issues in some rendering environments. This tool converts three consecutive dots (...) to the proper ellipsis character (…). The difference is subtle visually but matters for typographic correctness and can affect how text behaves in different rendering systems.

Sentence capitalisation works by capitalising the first word after a period, question mark, or exclamation mark followed by whitespace. This produces incorrect results in two common cases. First, abbreviations followed by a capital: "Dr. Smith" -- the tool may incorrectly capitalise "smith" if there are not enough heuristics to detect the abbreviation. Second, intentional lowercase after a period in creative writing or brand names. The tool mitigates the abbreviation problem by only capitalising after a period followed by two or more spaces, but this is not a perfect solution. If you use abbreviations frequently, consider turning sentence capitalisation off and applying it selectively.