Traditionally, le sommaire (the brief list of contents) is part of the prelims, whereas la table des matières (the detailed list of contents) can be found at the end of a book. There are exceptions, though.

As you probably know, French punctuation style is rather different. Here is a summary, but you would probably want a French stylebook, including rules for the order of matter in a French book.

I’m not concerned with the content. I’m not responsible for proofreading. What I’m concerned with are things like how do the french accent markes affect leading and letterspacing? Should I worry about hyphenation more? Stuff like that.

Josh, with all due respect, you may not be designing the book from scratch, but you should still be concerned with the content, IMHO.

In addition to Maxim’s and William’s suggestions, I would add that, according to Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, French hyphenation is different (at least sometimes) from English hyphenation. Perhaps there are French hyphenation dictionaries or plug-ins for the program you will be using to lay out the text.

Also, if I am not mistaken, the text on the spine of French books traditionally runs from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

The biggest thing you will need to address is the hyphenation but I’m not sure how to deal with that - I have traditionally been concerned with the other way around (translations into English).

I agree with Ricardo that you do have to pay attention to the content but your wife should be able to help with that.

The french also use different symbols for dialogue but I assume that will be in the manuscript and not something you will need to format. Also, I find a lot of french publishers don’t indent paragraphs, but I think that’s weird. I have also learned that European book design to a large extent is far plainer and less decorative than American. I have no idea why this is or why it should be.

InDesign allows selection of hyphenation dictionary by language. Select French in the pop-up menu on the text/paragraph tools.

ChrisL

Thank you all for your helpful comments. Just to clarify, I didn’t mean that I wasn’t concerned with the content at all, like Ricardo pointed out, my wife will be reviewing the book for its content. I was concerned about whether or not I should accept the job of laying out the book in french, not how to proofread it.