SmartyPants Type Plugin

Textile does that and more. WP has Textile and Textile2 available for your use.

It’s the “and more” part that I, personally, don’t like about Textile. However, WP has a built-in feature that does everything SmartyPants does, Chris. You don’t have to download any extra plugins, either. (The only difference that bothered me is that you need to type “—” to get an em-dash). ??

well there is a difference between a hyphen-minus (what we use on the keyboard) and an actual minus, em and en dash.. so something has to be done ??

If you want to use SmartyPants with WordPress, you can grab this: Textile 2.0.2 and SmartyPants-PHP plugins.
Basically, the SmartyPants plugin is just a wrapper for the SmartyPants-PHP distro, and if you want to use it without Textile 2 you’ll need to add your own add_filter calls to the file. But if you enable Textile 2 — even if you don’t use any of the Textile 2 features — it will SmartyPants your text. If you don’t enable SmartyPants, the Textile 2 plugin uses wptexturize().
This is actually a different implementation of Textile 2 that more closely mirrors the MT version by Brad Choate, not a hacked-up version of the one that ships with WP.

I’m making a mini-wrapper for SmartyPants-PHP. It may still have a few bugs, but I’m double-checking, and should have something to post, soon.

You may also try my own PHP port of SmartyPants. It already works as a WordPress plugin, just like PHP Markdown.

https://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/

well there is a difference between a hyphen-minus (what we use on the keyboard) and an actual minus, em and en dash.. so something has to be done ??

WP converts “—” to an em dash because it converts “–” to an en dash. Just need to stutter a little longer to get an em dash…

Less work for me!