[rodelrod]

This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout.

This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all over the place.

The Académie Française should have dealt with this years ago, if their ass wasn't stuck in the 17th century.

[0] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+202F

[jobigoud]

A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout for when you need it. In the BÉPO layout this is at SHIFT + space. Especially simple since all double punctuations (:?!; those that require an nbsp before them) are also accessed with SHIFT.

[rich_sasha]

Better still, why not abandon the space as a character, and render the colon with extra space to the left when locale is French?

[nephanth]

Azerty layout could certainly map shift-space to unbreakable space too

But honestly, rather than changing keyboards (which is hard), why doesn't Google just pick a shorthand that doesn't break typography rules, like `@` instead of `:`

[cryptonector]

A modern solution is to abandon old, no-longer-relevant typographic language rules, or to make typographic language rules context-specific.

But I agree that we need to make several alternative space characters easy to type:

  - non-breaking space (for this French rule)
  - wide space (for disambiguating sentence
    ending periods from non-sentence-ending
    periods)
  - zero-width non-breaking space (for
    preventing word-splitting?)

[Normille]

  >A modern solution is simply to have non-breaking space easily accessible in your keyboard layout 

An even better solution would be --for grown up people who have progressed beyond cave-painting and want to communicate using, you know, actual words-- to be able to disable emojis completely.

Fucking moronic shite that they are. I've seen people on Twatter and FB have entire conversations in bloody emojis. Talk about reverse evolution! Why don't we just go back to grunting and gesturing and have done with it?

[cryptonector]

If you fail to put a space before a colon when writing in French, what happens next? Do people point and laugh? You get disciplined? Or would French speakers accept this as a better way to use the colon character?

It looks like this rule is based on old typographic considerations. Much like the Spanish Royal Academy's rule that capitalized letters carry no accents (unlike the opposite French rule that capitalized letters do carry accents!), which stems from typewriters not having accented letters, so one would type a vowel, backspace, then an apostrophe to make an accented vowel, but for capitals there's not enough space so you couldn't and wouldn't overstrike them.

Users and language academies should distinguish typographic from non-typographic language rules, and typographic rules should be context-specific (well technology-specific, since technology is the context).

[shakow]

I don't know, what would happen in English if you didn't capitalize the days of the week? Do people point and laugh? You get disciplined? Or would English speakers accept this as a better way to write the days of the week?

No human language on Earth is in a position where it can laughs at others for their idiomatisms.

[sdeframond]

Or, word processors could understand that the pattern

"some-chars" + <whitespace> + ":"

must be treated as a single word in French.

(I guess it's more complicated than I imagine it is, alright)

[cryptonector]

It's more complicated than you imagine it is. Basically you need to know both: whether the current locale is a French locale, and also whether original text was written in a French locale.

The former is easy enough, but also very annoying to multilingual people since one might run in a Spanish locale but occasionally write in French. So that's not a solution.

The latter is... hard to do, because while Unicode has language tags that you can embed in documents, those are deprecated and they were never well supported, and so there's no way to mark-up text as being in one language or another, and a document-wide setting wouldn't be enough nor sufficiently generic and standard and portable.

The best solution here is to relax the French typographic rule (since it isn't needed anymore). But that would take time to filter through to French speakers (writers, and readers) so that they learn to not put that pesky space before punctuation, but also so that they don't complain when it's missing.

Or... you know, this business of emoji pickers could be something you could turn off. Nahhh, that would never fly! (/s)

[makapuf]

And thus impossible to use the emoji inserting feature, and other bugs (silently replacing whitespace with different but looking the same whitespace will make for fun issues)

[nephanth]

Libreoffice, and I believe ms word too, automatically replaces the space before a colon with a non-breaking one

[TheRealPomax]

This sounds like it's not actually true? If it was, the French code page 646 that we used until Unicode finally won would have included a narrow space, but it doesn't. "Regular" computer text in French has only ever used a normal space, even if handwriting and/or "true" typesetting using typesetting solutions like TeX or PageMaker etc. allowed for a narrow space.

[pcdavid]

FWIW, LibreOffice automatically inserts an actual Unicode NO-BREAK SPACE when I type ":" at the end of a word (if the language is set for French of course). If I insert an actual SPACE and then hit ":", it even replaces the SPACE with a NO-BREAK SPACE.

I'd be surprised MS Word doesn't do the same. No need for a "true" typesetting solution.

[bombcar]

Codepages are from back in the era of little memory available and monospaced fonts.

And another "US English" centered thing; spacing does not really matter in English, but can have functional differences in other languages and scripts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU is a fun look at one of the problems with Unicode in general.

[dieulot]

This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_1010 There’s no space for it nor for many other more useful characters (like â).

[rodelrod]

This is mostly correct, but I don't see how it contradicts my statement.

Did the 646 standard account for variable-width characters at all?

[keybored]

> Especially simple since all double punctuations (:?!; those that require an nbsp before them) are also accessed with SHIFT.

I just tested with `setxkmap fr`. These are not shifted:

    :!;

Only this requires Shift:

    ?

Also French layouts use an inverted number row (although none of those are accessed through that row).

[keybored]

Correction: `setxkbmap fr`.

[Aissen]

This is partially false, because there isn't one true AZERTY layout. There are various platform implementations, with MS Windows being the most common.

In fact, french standard body AFNOR actually updated their AZERTY layout standard three years ago to include more characters, including the narrow non-breaking space. In traditional ISO-like fashion, one must pay to access this standard, but you can find an example here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_-_AZERTY_-_AFNOR....

It's mapped to AltGr + Maj + Space. Now you just need to find how to install/enable this layout on the platforms you care about.

[rodelrod]

CORRECTION: narrow non-breaking space goes before ";", "!" and "?". Before ":" you should use regular non-breaking space. That is, in France. In French-speaking Switzerland it's a narrow non-breaking space everywhere.

This is the best reference I could find: https://www.lalanguefrancaise.com/articles/espace-insecable