Stop WordPress From Converting Punctuation ?

Hi everyone,

As a longtime wordpress user (around the 1.2 to 1.5 era), I have notice since ver2.0, wordpress has been trying to convert more and more Punctuations to its liking.

famous examples before 2.8 includes:

apostrophe mark ‘ => ‘
double quotation mark ” => “
double dashes — => —

things got worse for title as all apostrophes are converted to ‘ , and all quotation marks are converted to ” . So they’re never closed!

With the new 2.8, even the single dash, or “hyphen-minus” as some would call, are converted into “en dash”. While they look exactly the same under certain font (including monospace, which this forum use), converting a Halfwidth character into a Fullwidth alternative without users’ consent seems to be a bad idea.

this two characters are different, compare them in a notepad (with Arial font etc.)
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While I very much appreciate WP doing the dirty job for me, there are times, or most of the time, I really want to stop wordpress from working so hard.

So comes the questions:

Is there a simple wordpress hook that I can remove to disable these sorts of conversion ?
Or do I have to re-filter everything to achieve what I desired ?
Or is there an option I didn’t notice for two years ?

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PS: I know out-in-the-wild punctuation lovers will disagree with me on this, but let’s talk user freedom for once. Even panda doesn’t eat, shoot and leave, right ? ??