First, a quick reminder that there’s still time to enter the 60 Mac Tips giveaway and win $80 worth of awesome mac tips in iBooks and Vimeo streaming/download formats!

And now, a quick note that I’ve improved the “Clean Up Smart Quotes” service in the Markdown Service Tools. I also renamed it to “Clean Up Smart Punctuation,” so if you have the Smart Quotes version installed, you’ll need to delete that to avoid duplication.

The service now also converts invisible whitespace characters. These happen a lot when clipping from websites where horrible WYSIWYG editors have inserted a bunch of non-breaking spaces ( ) and the clipper’s entity conversion turns those into control characters. Then markup like emphasis breaks. So now you can just run “Clean Up Smart Punctuation” and it will convert curly quotes, guillemots, ellipses, and remove invisible characters that make debugging without an advanced code editor quite difficult.

See the project page for more info and a download link!