So — you’ve digested Anatomy of a print design, and you’re interested in making your online and print publications look more professional. Unfortunately, HTML and CSS lack many of the features that publishing applications afford… things like kerning, smart line breaks, and paragraph keep options just aren’t there. Learning a few new key combinations, however, will lend dignity to your text regardless of the application you’re composing it in.

The following key combinations are for Mac OS X… if someone knows the Windows equivalents, feel free to add them in the comments.

• Smart quotes. Option-[ and Option-Shift-[ produce “smart quotes”, which differ from their uneducated brethren by pointing in toward the text they enclose. Similarly, Option-] and Option-Shift-] produce smart apostrophes, of which the leftward-pointing character is most commonly used.
• Ellipses. You may have noticed that Microsoft Word replaces a sequence of three periods with the more compact ellipsis character (…). Option-; will type this character directly.
• Em dashes. Em dashes are commonly used in place of semicolons — they separate phrases by a pause of intermediate length. You should put a space on either side of this character, which can be produced by Option-Shift-(hyphen).
• En dashes. En dashes are used–in this sentence, for example–to separate a parenthetical phrase from the rest of its sentence. Type this character by pressing Option-(hyphen), and note that no space should be placed between it and the surrounding text.

Given time, these four characters will become as familiar to you as the home row. WordPress appears to smarten quotes and ellipses automatically, which is fantastic — now if it would automatically detect ligatures!

Update: en and em dashes are produced on Windows by holding Alt while typing 0150 or 0151 on the numeric keypad.