---
title: Typography and Its Limits
date: 2026-03-28
tags: [journal]
---
"Quotes become curly," she said -- and dashes become dashes, while an ellipsis... becomes one character. That
is the whole of what the engine does to an author's words: a Markdown parser option, nothing more.

Inside a code span none of it happens: `"quotes" -- and ellipses...` survive byte for byte, because the
typographer works on the parsed tree rather than on the text.

Line breaking is not the engine's business at all. This paragraph is deliberately long enough to wrap several
times on a narrow screen, which is where you would notice a lonely last word — and the stylesheet asks the
browser to avoid one with `text-wrap: pretty`, because only the browser knows where the lines actually fall.

    A code block, indented.
    Also untouched.