It just occurred to me that if we are encoding our HTML pages in UTF-8 to handle multiple languages and using web fonts with multilanguage support, shouldn't we be able to directly insert the simple apostrophe, ellipsis, and em-dash? RubyPants-Unicode is a Ruby port of the smart-quotes library SmartyPants that outputs unicode characters (UTF-8) instead of HTML entities. The original "SmartyPants" is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities.