Hi Russellm
I don't think there is a full space before the punctuation.
(not in swiss-french anyway)
by saying that I've learned to add a tiny bit of space
between the last letter and the punctuation.

I work in Geneva and I'm almost always asked to put in a space. Also, my spellchecker flags it as an error if there's no space.

This web page lists the rather specific spacing conventions used by the Government Printing Office of France. Basically, punctuation marks that consist of two elements (: ; ? ! etc.) should be separated from the closest word to which they "belong" (for example, the last word of a sentence for a question mark, or the first word of a quotation for an opening guillemet) by a non-breaking space. Whether that space should be full-width or thin depends on the punctuation mark.

I thought, the distance of the punctuation marks to the previous word should be controlled by the plain metrics and the kerning, but not by any space character. The distance is often to small, because the left side bearing of the punctuation mark, stored in the font, is often to small. And I don’t understand, why there should be a difference between punctuation marks, that consist of two or one element, except from the fact, that one element punctuation marks cannot collide with the arm of a T for example. A comma can also be to close to a letter. (A week ago I bought a book, in which I was irritated by the small left side bearing of the comma more than one time, because it simply was not visible enough.) If a punctuation mark is exactly between two terms, I am irritated. The distance to the following word should be clearly bigger (but in most cases it should not consist of two spaces). But note, that I am not a professional.

@Arno: It's all custom, convention, tradition. The French make that distinction between "normal" and "special" punctuation (the ones consisting of two elements). I agree with you, it's weird, but, well, they eat snails ;-)

... the distance of the punctuation marks to the previous word should be controlled by the plain metrics and the kerning ...
That would require (at least) two kinds of metrics for each font. Maybe we'll get this as an Opentype feature one day: mark a text as "French" and the question marks stand off.

Duck&run
Andreas

Thanks , all.

thanks for the link Aric.

I presume the practice would be the same in Quebec?

I like the Opentype solution.

What about punctuation in other langages?

@ fontgrube ... it’s weird, but, well, they eat snails ;-)<.cite>

... and in other places folks eat fried Mars Bars. ;o)

-=®=-

The standard typographic conventions are more or less the same in France and Quebec, but the word processing conventions are different: as I understand it, in France, the convention is to type a normal space in each case; in Quebec, the convention is generally to leave out the space, except in conjunction with the colon. For both locales, MS Word is configured by default to convert the appropriate spaces into (full-width) non-breaking spaces.

The recommendation that spaces be omitted in Quebec is set forth http://here by the Office québécois de la langue française; a small note at the bottom makes it clear that the recommendation takes into account the shortcomings of common word processors (as of 2002), and that if you have a way to insert a thin space, you should use it before semicolons, exclamation points, and question marks.

None of the "official" lists of rules that I've seen seem to include percentage signs or currency signs (dollar, euro, pound), but looking through some French language materials it's clear that these are also offset by space (in both France and Quebec), and there are probably signs that fall into this category as well. An ellipsis is not offset by space, however. Apparently the rule of thumb ("signe double, espace double") has to be qualified a bit.

I'm not aware of any language other than French where extra space is conventionally inserted around punctuation.

The best book and probably the official book from the Imprimerie National , is :

Lexique des règles typographiques. Imprimerie nationale (France: Imprimerie nationale. 1990) ISBN: 2-11-081075-0 (pbk.) http://www.amazon.fr/Lexique-r%C3%A8gles-typographiques-lImprimerie-Nati...

Applications like Microsoft Word (French version '98) use to add a word space before or after many puncuation marks like the guillemets.

I had added most of these rules to the Microsoft Character Standards descriptions for 'punctuation' found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/punc.aspx

there are also other French rules in other sections such as 'lowercase' for the alignment and use of ordinals 'premier, première' and 'deuxième' showing common use and typographically correct uses.

Found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/lowercase.aspx

IMO full spaces before ! and ? look bad. A small space is fine. No space too sometimes, depending on the typeface. I would say, forget the rules, go by the eye. In the end it is about the text being legible, clear and looking good, not about following blindly some old principles.

I may add i'm swiss french too.

From a French point of view:
- punctuation signs with both a lower and an upper part which take a space before and after (hence the ellipsis does not);
- the best practice is to have a non-breaking thin space before and one normal space after, although this may cause problems in justified texts (some word processors, some versions of XPress and Indesign shorten the normal spaces so much that they become smaller than the justified 'normal' breaking space);
- whether there is a space between numbers on the one hand and monetary signs or percentage on the other hand seems to be left to the typesetter - however since these signs all stand for words, it would make sense to space them like a word (space before and after).

Also, look at 19C books in English (and many other languages), they are often spaces like French is nowadays. My understanding was that the practice of taking away that extra space was established by commercial publishers (notably of newspapers) who wanted to save space, thus money. I may be wrong!

Last: the book quoted from the Imprimerie Nationale is very good, but as the title says, it is only the rules this printing press used internally and has no pretense of being the norm.

(closing tag typo)

-=®=-

Thanks, to all!

…
-=®=-