Lanai treats every post as if a thoughtful editor were preparing it for display — but never modifies the underlying record. Cleanup happens at the rendering layer, the original is always one tap away, and the user can turn it off. Here's the spectrum, and where on it we apply each tier.
The architectural rule
The data model in BlueskyModels stores the post body exactly as authored — as RichText with raw UTF-8 byte-offset facets. Cleanup takes a RichText and a context, and returns a display-ready AttributedString. Round-tripping a post through cleanup is a one-way display transformation — the original is never lost.
The six tiers
Typographic intervention exists on a spectrum from doing nothing to doing a great deal. We define six tiers explicitly so we can be deliberate about where each gets applied.
The baseline. Respect Unicode. Don't break what the author wrote.
Always on, every surface, no toggle.
Em dashes display as em dashes, not as `--`. Emoji at appropriate sizes. Bidirectional text handled. Grapheme clusters preserved. Mentions, hashtags, and links rendered from facet metadata. This is not cleanup; it's the absence of carelessness.
We render what was authored. We don't substitute.
Detect and reverse rendering corruption.
Always on, every surface, no toggle.
Mojibake from incorrect encoding (`’` → `'`). BOM characters that snuck into the post body. Zero-width joiners that are clearly artifacts of copy-paste rather than intentional emoji sequences. Non-breaking spaces in contexts where they break layout. The author didn't write `’`; they wrote `'` that got corrupted.
Mojibake recovered to the character actually authored.
Trim accidents at the boundaries. Touch nothing in the middle.
Always on, every surface, no toggle.
Leading and trailing whitespace trimmed. Runs of three or more newlines collapsed to double newlines (preserves paragraph breaks; removes accidental gaps). Trailing whitespace stripped from line ends. Critically: never collapse internal whitespace, never modify indentation, never touch ASCII art structure.
Boundaries normalized. Paragraph break preserved.
Genuine cleanup. Improving what the author wrote.
Default on in the timeline. User-toggleable in settings.
Convert straight quotes (`"` and `'`) to curly. Convert double-hyphens (`--`) to em dashes. Convert triple periods (`...`) to ellipses. Skip cleanup inside text that looks like code, inside URLs, and inside facet ranges. Apply locale-aware conventions when the post's `langs` field indicates non-English.
Straight quotes curl, double-hyphen becomes em dash.
Backtick code block preserved; trailing dots become an ellipsis.
The editorial layer. Hair-spaces, locale quotes, real minus signs.
Always on in Reading Mode. Always on in image exports. Never in the timeline by default.
Hair-space adjustments around em dashes. Locale-aware quotation marks (French guillemets, German lower-quotes, Japanese brackets). Proper minus signs in numerical contexts. Multiplication signs in dimensions. Degree symbols, fractions, trademark and copyright symbols. Real editorial transformations — each can backfire on edge cases — applied where the user has explicitly opted in.
French guillemets get their thin spaces, in French.
Hyphen becomes a real minus; degrees become a degree sign.
Pull quotes, hanging punctuation, optical alignment, hyphenation.
Reading Mode and image exports only. Never on the timeline.
Pull quotes for sentences the user selects. Hanging punctuation that pulls opening quotes and certain glyphs into the margin. Optical margin alignment for visual balance. Justified text with proper hyphenation. First-line indents on very long posts. Widow and orphan control so the last line of a paragraph never strands alone at the top of a column.
Hanging punctuation, the way a typesetter would set it.
In practice
In the timeline, you see beautifully-rendered posts and probably don't think about why. The em dashes look like em dashes. The quotes are curly. The whitespace is right. You might notice, once, that posts in Lanai look better than the same posts elsewhere. You probably don't notice why.
In settings, there's a section called Typographic touch-ups with three options — All touch-ups (Tiers 0–3), Just display fixes (Tiers 0–2), None (Tier 0 only). Default is All touch-ups.
In a long-press menu on any post, there's Show original. You can verify, copy, or just see.
Bright lines
For the record
Typography is one piece. The intelligence stance and the Postcard Mode argument are the other two.
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