Field guide / one rule at a time
Good typography is mostly a hundred tiny decisions no one is paid to make. This guide takes them one at a time — the rule, why it exists, and the exact examples our engine fixes on the way out, so you don’t have to think about any of it.
The rules
Each rule is a small convention professionals follow without thinking — the quotation mark, the dash, the accent no one notices. Together they’re the line between a document that was set and one that was merely typed, and our engine applies them for you on the way out.
The marks, spaces and characters that make up set text.
The quotes on your keyboard aren’t the ones typographers use. Why curly marks win, and the leading-apostrophe trap that fools most software.
Read the rule → Rule 02Three different marks for three different jobs — joins, ranges, and breaks. Type -- and --- and our engine sets the real dashes for you.
Read the rule → Rule 03Feet, inches, minutes and seconds take primes (′ ″), not quotes. The one place smart quotes reliably get it wrong — and the mark we leave to your hand.
Read the rule → Rule 04The double space is a typewriter habit. Why a single space is correct in typeset text, and how we normalise it without breaking code or URLs.
Read the rule → Rule 05The § and ¶ marks must never split from their number across a line break. The non-breaking space that holds them together — and what we bind for you.
Read the rule → Rule 06Three real marks, three ASCII fakes — and why (c) and (r) are a trap in legal writing. What our engine sets, and what it deliberately leaves alone.
Read the rule → Rule 07The letter x is not a multiplication sign, a hyphen is not a minus, 1/2 is not a fraction. The one math mark we can safely set — and the two we won’t guess.
Read the rule → Rule 08A value and its unit, an abbreviation and its number — 10 kg, p. 5 — must never split across a line. The invisible space that binds them, and the initials we leave alone.
Read the rule → Rule 09An é can be one real letter or a plain e wearing a floating accent — identical on the page, but only one is searchable. How we fold them back into the real character.
Read the rule → Rule 10An ellipsis is one character, not three periods — and not three spaced ones. The real glyph, the Bluebook exception, and what our engine sets for you.
Read the rule → Rule 11One exclamation point is enough; so is one question mark. Why !!! reads as noise, the expressive ?! we keep, and what our engine collapses.
Read the rule → Rule 12Doubled spaces, trailing gaps, invisible Unicode characters, stray spaces around punctuation — the quiet, universal cleanup we run on every file.
Read the rule → Rule 13The pair-by-pair spacing that keeps AV and To from drifting apart lives in the font — Word just leaves it off. Every document we set turns it on: DOCX, PDF and web reader alike.
Read the rule →How figures are set — thousands and decimals, by the document’s language.
The structure a Markdown file carries beyond its text — code, callouts, images — and what we do with it on the way to Word.
A fenced block that names its language comes across syntax-highlighted, not as a wall of grey. The theme you pick, and why the DOCX and the PDF match.
Read the rule → Rule 16A > [!warning] callout becomes a titled, colored box in Word — not a stray line of text. How five alert colors absorb the couple dozen callout names, and what happens to one we don’t know.
Read the rule → Rule 17Extended Markdown’s ==double-equals== marks a highlight. We turn it into a real highlighted run — and leave it literal wherever it sits inside your code.
Read the rule → Rule 18A wiki-style image embed, ![[chart.png]], is resolved and embedded like any picture — the pipe carries its caption, and a note embed falls back gracefully to text.
Read the rule → Rule 19The %%notes%% and ^block-ids you keep for yourself are scaffolding, not content. They’re stripped before anything renders — and left untouched inside your code.
Read the rule →