: How are the spaces done in France for ? ! : ; « » in a real-life work-flow? I have learnt what the spaces need to be in front of ? ! ; » and after « in French texts, namely thin
I have learnt what the spaces need to be in front of ? ! ; » and after « in French texts, namely thin spaces (1/8em). I got that from this question and its answers:
Principles of Typography for different languages
Now we also need to make sure that those thin spaces behave like non-breaking narrow space. There is a code point in Unicode for this purpose (U+202F) but it is 1/3 of a normal space (U+0020) and it is missing from many of our working typefaces.
So I wonder how this is done in France please. We are producing our documents in Scribus (very latest 1.5.3svn with the new text engine). But if there are French users who can share how they do this in InDesign it might help us, if we manage to adapt the work-flow to Scribus.
Edit: Sorry, seems my question was unclear: I am not asking about what lay people are doing but was talking to the main audience of "Graphic Design" here. We are interested to make our printed documents the same quality as contemporary professional output in France. We want a narrow space with punctuation and we want to avoid orphan-like punctuation at the beginning of a line. We know what we want; the question is how do designers produce those nice results in France? Does everybody write their own scripts? Are there some tools we have missed? :tidE
Do you use scripts? Do you have the 1/8em thin space on your keyboards? How to you guarantee that the punctuation glyphs do not jump to the next line? Do you get your fonts tweaked by the manufacturers?
We are producing French texts for paper and for websites, but we are in West Africa, so we cannot just ask next door. Our budgets is also very limited, so please answer more than just "pay for an InDesign licence and activate option 4711". We cannot pay, but we would gladly investigate option 4711, if it does exist for that purpose. Thank you.
Update 2017_06_14: Since no user shared real-life experience from typesetting in France, I have ordered two books from France. There are still stuck/lost in the mail (I am working in Africa). I have not forgotten to mark a final answer but am waiting to see what the documents can add for an answer.
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In my experience, most french speaking people simply insert a space. It's a pain, but this is what most are used to.
The result is that they are not very picky on the width of the space, but some space must be!
Most designers speak of a thin space (espace fine), so this is probably the most common choice in typography.
In the Web you can find some documents giving hints on which spaces you can / should use in which context, but most just say: "use a space". This detailed link could be helpful for you.
Now, concerning Scribus:
You can insert spaces from the "Insert > Space & Breaks" Menu.
You can only insert space "types" that are defined in the current font.
You can define shortcuts for the spaces (see the Shortcuts section in the Preferences)
You can use (and modify if it does not fit) one of the two Autoquote scripts that are distributed with Scribus itself.
I have this client and we typeset multiple brochures each month in 15+ languges (French included) and each language is translated from English by a professional translator. For the French layer, i've never been asked to use 1/8 spaces. They do indeed insert normal spaces before ? ! ; » and after «. The client is a multinational so if this was critical for French, they probably would have mentioned it.
In real life many French writers will probably be using MS Word, which is not very likely to use all the white spacing options you get with InDesign. How many people will set 1/8 spaces in MS Word?
So not sure about the 1/8 rule, this could be a personal preference which some translators will recommend and others won't. You might want to double check this rule before spending too much time on it.
I use InDesign so cannot speak for Scribus but the shortcut for a 1/8em space in InDesign (non-breaking by default) is cmd+option+shift+m or ctrl+alt+shift+m. Some people simply do a find/change and change it all by hand. This is usually how I teach my students to do it because we only work on short documents. I used to layout a magazine and got tired of this so I customized my own script that does this (as well as applying some other typographic rules) by using GREP and modifying the Find/Replace script already included in InDesign.
The thin space is a glyph that can be worked with like any other glyph, it is not built using kerning between glyphs.
I'm not sure which fonts fileformat.info searches specifically but I've never had problems with fonts that did not include this glyph. I've never given it thought before and this seems a bit odd to me now as I've ran into countless fonts that were missing the accents I need to do my work like "É, é, à, etc." Maybe InDesign would be able to generate 1/8em spaces using other spaces in the font if they were missing? I can however assure you that I've never seen a thin space built using kerning by InDesign!
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