Darius Dunkers Dossier

I just released a minor upgrade for Intypo, which includes the fix for image captions, as presented by Marcel Pauly (and Gregor Möllring). These two lines of code are included in Intypo 0.9.2 which is available on my download page. I have been running this with both WordPress 2.9 and 3.0.1 without problems, but didn’t test the caption issue so far.

Ich habe soeben eine neue Unterversion von Intypo herausgegeben, die das von einigen beschriebene Problem mit Bildbeschriftungen (hoffentlich) löst. Die zwei Zeilen Code wurden wie von Marcel Pauly (und Gregor Möllring) beschrieben geändert. Die neue Intypo-Version 0.9.2 ist auf der Download-Seite verfügbar. Intypo 0.9.2 scheint problemlos mit WordPress 2.9 und 3.0.1 zu funktionieren, die Bildbeschriftung habe ich selbst allerdings noch nicht getestet.

Just a note: The current release of my typography plug-in Intypo 0.9.1 works fine with the latest WordPress release 2.5.1 (and earlier versions as well).

Yes, Intypo doesn’t seem to cause any trouble with today’s brand new WordPress 2.3.

I’m sorry there haven’t been any updates for Intypo for quite a long time now. I will try to improve it when time permits.

Just a short note: No problem with the newest WordPress update.

Intypo is a plug-in for the popular blog software WordPress. It is an output formatting filter, just like the original wptexturize() function, but with several options, especially for languages other than English.

Intypo does not alter the stored text of your posts, so you can safely give it a try. Just deactivate or delete the plugin, if you don’t like it, and everything will be as before.

What Intypo does is filtering the text of your posts when they are displayed to the readers of your blog, and then replacing some characters for a better typography. This again is default WordPress behaviour, but using Intypo, you as the administrator of the blog can influence the typography.

For example, if there is a non-typographic quotation mark (") in your text, WordPress tries to recognize, whether it is at the beginning or the end of a quote. If WordPress assumes it is at the beginning, standard WordPress replaces it by “, otherwise by ”. One aim of Intypo is to improve the recognition of these cases, even if the quote is e.g. in parenthesis or brackets. The recognition of single quotes is even more complicated, because they might be confused with apostrophes.

One problem with WordPress replacing the quotation marks is, that the style of quotation varies from language to language, but default WordPress always applies the English style. This is fine for Irish, Spanish, or Portuguese, but not desirable for other languages. In addition, several languages allow more than one style of quotation. For German texts, we have three different styles:„…” is the most popular. In print, the Guillemet marks »…« are common, but some publishers like the Rowohlt Verlag use the French direction «…», which is also more common in Switzerland.

So, what Intypo does, is give you the option to decide which style of quotation should be used in your blog. To help you find the right for your language, Intypo knows the typography for 23 European languages, from Portuguese to Turkish, from Norwegian to Italian etc. You can select anyone of these, no matter what language your texts are written in, even if it is not one of the 23.

Here is an example: If you type "lorem ipsum 'dolor' sit amet."WordPress by default displays

“Lorem ipsum ‘dolor’ sit amet.”

With Intypo, you can select e.g.

„Lorem ipsum ‚dolor‘ sit amet.“

or

»Lorem ipsum ›dolor‹ sit amet.«

or

«Lorem ipsum ‹dolor› sit amet.»

for a German text. If it was French, just select

« Lorem ipsum ‹ dolor › sit amet. »

Like the original texturize function, Intypo also replaces apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, and trademark symbols by typographic equivalents.

• Get Intypo

This is a fixed version of Intypo 0.9.0 released a few hours earlier. Because of an error in the regular expressions, Intypo 0.9.0 applied wrong quotation marks at the beginnings of paragraphs, blog names etc. This is fixed now, so I hope you like all those changes in the new version.

A new version of my Intypo plugin for improved typography in WordPress blog software is available now.

What’s new in Intypo 0.9.0

• Intypo is now replacing the original »wptexturize()« function. (Intypo 0.6.4 was post-filtering after texturize.) This avoids unnecessary double replacement.
• Just like the original texturize function, Intypo keeps away from <code>, <pre>, <style>, and <script> areas now.
• Intypo has several improvements in the regular expressions for much better recognition of quotation marks.
• You can now add your own phrases starting with apostrophes to avoid replacement with single quotes.
• This »cockney replace« function is now only applied, if the cockney word is followed by a space. This allows phrases which are identical with some word beginnings (e.g. ’t in Dutch or ’ne in German).
• Changed usage of m-dashes (as suggested by Till Westermayer), but depending on language style. (If the default english style is selected, two dashes surrounded by spaces are replaced by a m-dash. If a different style is selected, they get replaced by a n-dash. You can still invoke a m-dash by typing three dashes then.)
• Reworked admin page, suggesting quote styles depending on the language selected (avoiding the long list of old Intypo) and with a larger preview text for easier recognition of the quotation marks.
• Some minor changes which might save some server memory and increase speed.
• Filter is now beeing applied to »category_description«, »list_cats«, »comment_author«, »comment_text«, »single_post_title«, »the_title«, »the_content«, »the_excerpt«, and »bloginfo«.

Installation and upgrade instructions:

1. Download Intypo from my downloads page.
2. If upgrading, delete the old intypo.php file from your plugins directoy.
3. Unpack the downloaded file.
4. Copy the intypo folder with its two files to your plugins directory, so that the new intypo.php is now located at wp-content/plugins/intypo/intypo.php
   and you have the language codes at wp-content/plugins/intypo/language.php
5. Go to your plugins page and activate Intypo. (This is also necessary if upgrading!)
6. Go to Options / Intypo page and select the desired style. (You may even select a style from a different language, if you want.

Some examples which did not work with earlier versions of Intypo (and still don’t without Intypo):

• Dutch: Jeroen in ’t Veldt
• German: »Gib mir mal ’nen Besen!«
• English: You may download Intypo (»here«).

Exactly at the right moment, WordPress 2.1 is here, including a new option to use a static page as start page for a WordPress driven site. This is just what I was thinking about as a solution for a small website I am currently creating, which has a static main page but needs to be extended by a news page.

Good news: all* plugins I am running in my WordPress blogs seem to work fine with WP 2.1. Especially, I am glad to say:

No problems encountered with the current version of my InTypo plugin in WordPress 2.

Update: Sadly, there is a problem with the well known Blix theme (featured as one of the few on the official WordPress website) in WordPress 2.1. I was using part of its code to get a list of my static pages on top of my site, but it is not working in WP 2.1

2nd Update: I found and fixed a solution for Blix theme in WordPress 2.1. Used the same method to fix my own theme.

* note: The WP-Stats plugin required an update, which is available from the author’s website.

Since my provider has killed my complete server content (and reminded me to make a backup afterwards!), it will still take a while until everything will be runnig as it used to.

I’m sorry, InTypo is not available for the moment. InTypo 0.6.4 is available again from my Download page.

InTypo ist leider derzeit nicht verfügbar. auf der Download-Seite in Version 0.6.4 erhältlich.

Neosecurity has reported some (low risk) security issues on WordPress. One concern is about the fact that several included files do not prevent direct access on them. As these files are missing several functions if called directly, they stop with an error message, which may contain the local file path on the server. This is no security problem itself, but the infomation might be useful for other attacks.

To prevent files that should be included by other WordPress files, from being accessed directly, the following code can be added at the beginning of the script file:
if (eregi('filename_of_this_script.php‹, $_SERVER[‹PHP_SELF‹])) die(‹You are not allowed to access this file directly.‹);
(Don’t forget to replace filename_of_this_script by the actual filename of the file you added this line to.)

According to a posting on wordpress.org, this won’t work if PHP is running via CGI on your server. So I have included this line in a new version 0.6.4 of Intypo, but not activated it. If you want to enable it, edit intypo.php and remove the # at the beginning of line 15 of the code. If this causes trouble on your server, just edit intypo.php once more and add the # again to disable execution of line 15.

See also

• wordpress.org/support/topic/63115 [En]
• www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/70263 [De]