For pretty URLs that Fluid Topics generates automatically based on the configuration in the Pretty URL administration interface (as opposed to those defined manually in a control file or a source document), the application allows spaces and special characters when adding static text and metadata values.
However, with the exception of underscores, periods, tildes and forward slashes, Fluid Topics normalizes all special characters as follows:
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Fluid Topics transforms special characters such as spaces into hyphens in the rendered pretty URL.
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Fluid Topics transforms characters with accents entered as static text or in a metadata value into characters without accents in the rendered pretty URL.
Normalizing URLs is Fluid Topic's default behavior. It is possible to change this behavior by clearing a checkbox in the Normalization section of the Pretty URL administration interface.
Clearing the Remove accents and other UTF-8 combining characters checkbox invalidates existing Pretty URLs.
Convert pretty URLs to lowercase
An additional option in this section lets authorized administrators convert all pretty URLs to lowercase.
Selecting the checkbox to activate this option triggers a reprocess job and recomputes all existing pretty URLs.
In the long term, activating this option can improve a site's SEO rankings. However, if existing pretty URLs have already been indexed by bots, activating this option could worsen SEO rankings for a period of time.