A small minor mode for easily entering Unicode double and single quotes, em and en dashes, and horizontal ellipses.

tkb-smart-unicode-mode.el

;; look at https://github.com/ndw/xmlunicode for xmlunicode.el 
;; xmlunicode-character-list.el.  xmlunicode.el provides the 
;; "smart-unicode-*" functions.
(load-library "unichars")
(load-library "xmlunicode")

(defun tkb-describe-character (before)
  "Describe the character after point (before if a prefix was specified)
if it is a unicode character."
  (interactive "P")
  (let* ((char (if before (char-before) (char-after)))
         (info (assoc (encode-char char 'ucs) unicode-character-list))
         (info (cons (format "#x%X" (car info)) info)))
    (message "%S" info)))
(tkb-keys ((kbd "C-c k d") #'tkb-describe-character))

(define-minor-mode tkb-smart-unicode-mode
  "Toggle smart unicode punctuation" nil " ♻⚔☣☥☸◉⅙✽☮" ; "✘▧▧⚅☑☢☹☺♠♥♦♣♨"
  '(("\"" . unicode-smart-double-quote)
    ("'"  . unicode-smart-single-quote)
    ("-"  . unicode-smart-hyphen)
    ("."  . unicode-smart-period)))

(defadvice unicode-smart-hyphen (after tkb-after-unicode-smart-hyphen last
                                       activate compile)
  (tkb-describe-character t))