Need a way for user to override

[yurivictor]

No idea the best flow for this. But open to suggestions.

[matthewbuchanan]

A UI suggestion: if the user selects a converted glyph (or moves the cursor to one side of a converted glyph?) a tooltip-style popup could be displayed with “Undo change” as the only option.

[jgarber623]

What about using \ as an escape character? \' would be converted simply to ', etc. \\ would need to be converted to \.

This could get complicated…

[matthewbuchanan]

The whole concept of “escaping” isn't really something that non-technical people have a feeling for, which means you’d need explanatory text beside the point of text input. With an inline popup, there’s understanding from auto-correct conventions on platforms like iOS (and even Medium’s style editor thing).

[jasonsantamaria]

Completely agree about the tooltip override (and that was actually in our first prototype). I think that will be where we eventually head with this. But, it's also nice to have an alternative for when additional UI isn't possible or when it could be difficult to baseline (touch devices). In our current implementation with this, we don't have the option of leaning on additional UI, so we were trying to think of good alternatives for overriding.

[matthewbuchanan]

In that case, support for escaping makes good sense (and doesn’t prevent custom UI in the future).

[OllyHodgson]

For some reason this popped back into my head today, while using MS Office 2010 at work. Yay!

When it automagically changes " into “ it's added to the undo stack, so a quick ctrl-z will make it go away.

It sometimes auto-formats bigger things, e.g. typing *``tab makes a bullet list. When this happens, a button appears where the change was made. Tapping that gives me the option of undoing it, switching the feature off, and accessing the options for the AutoFormat feature. The same happens when I paste something - it does whatever the default is, but also gives me a button with the options of pasting as plain text, integrating with the document styles, or using the source document's formatting.

Food for thought, anyway.