| name | micro-typography-discipline |
| description | Use when polishing typography to publication quality. Micro-details (smart quotes, em-dashes, ellipses, ligatures) separate editorial from default web.
|
Micro-typography Discipline
Smart quotes, true em-dashes, ellipsis character, ligatures, true small caps — these tiny corrections separate hand-crafted from machine-generated.
Smart vs straight quotes
Always use smart quotes (curly): 'Hello' and 'world'.
Never straight quotes ("Hello" and "world").
Enable: copy directly from typographically-correct source, or use Unicode entities (‘, ’, “, ”). CMS systems (Markdown, MDX) auto-convert; verify.
Em-dash, en-dash, hyphen
- Hyphen (-): joins compound words (well-known)
- En-dash (–): range (2020–2025)
- Em-dash (—): pause or break in thought (this — yes, this — is what I mean)
Never use double-hyphen (--) for em-dash. Unicode: — and –.
Ellipsis
True ellipsis character (…) not three dots (...). Unicode: ….
Three dots have wider spacing. The ellipsis character is a single typographic glyph with tighter spacing.
Ligatures
Enable in CSS: font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'dlig' 1;.
Common ligatures: 'fi', 'fl', 'ff', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'.
More advanced: 'st', 'ct' (Fraunces has these).
Ligatures collapse letter pairs into single glyphs for better visual rhythm.
Where this fits in the X3 empire
Applied to all CardPrepAI typographic content. The detail that separates AI-generated from publication-quality.
