Hraban,

> In what kind of workflows does your program make sense?

Have you looked around the web lately?

KeenWrite (https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite), my plain text editor, can neither convert nor easily type curly quotes into the application. Recently, I added ConTeXt integration for exporting to PDF files. ConTeXt doesn't curl the quotes, which I found a little surprising (because LaTeX has a quote curling package). Not seeing an obvious solution, I coded my own library because all the other libraries I found were either not up to the task or required a massive natural language parser dependency.

My workflow will be: Edit plain text in KeenWrite, export to XHTML, curl the quotes, run ConTeXt to typeset XHTML.

Another workflow: Edit plain text in KeenWrite, export to XHTML, curl the quotes, upload to CMS.

The problem is that when typewriters were invented, curly quotes didn't make it onto the popular layouts. Then, after Unicode, curly closing single quotes and curly apostrophes were not made unique. HTML entities get it right, though, with l/rdquo, l/rsquo, and apos. C'est la vie.