Well, John Gruber’s Smarty-pants, despite not advertising itself as being tested with MT3, does the job rather nicely, converting quotes and dashes into real quotes and dashes. Most pleasing.
Less successful is the MT pluginpack’s ‘DropCap‘ module, which is terribly clever but, out of the box, shoves the first character in rather precisely the wrong place for a drop cap. Shame. So I diddled with it, changing the setup from good old table-hackery to nice clean never-going-to-work CSS… there followed 40 minutes of futzing with the stylesheet to produce something that looked good on my Macs, and still vaguely works in IE6.
The result, on a Mac, is quite nice. On IE6… it’s pretty ghastly, actually. But I’m stuffed if I can find a better compromise, and I’m not about to get into conditional stylesheet madness. If you dislike the way it looks on your system, use FireFox, for heaven’s sake! But I might ditch the dropcap anyway. I’ll sleep on it. Justified text, however, is the very beagle’s По-русски.
Just one more thing I’m going to try tonight… and that’s never going to work in IE. 🙁
Listening to: Very Yeah from the album “Quattro” by Corduroy