sur espacement français
French spacing (e.g., setting two spaces, rather than one, after a period) is not a distinctly French phenomenon. More accurately, it’s old-fashioned, and neither the French, nor the English, nor us Yanks, do it anymore. Just pick up a copy of Le Monde and see how it’s set. The spaces between sentences are no greater than the spaces between words.
There are plenty of differences between the way copy is set in France and the way it’s set in the U.S.
In France:
- Proper adjectives — like french and english and american — are set down, rather than up.
- 2:30 pm is set 14h30.
- June 23, 1975 is set 23 juin 1975.
- 75% is set 75 %.
- Punctuation is set after a closing quote, rather than before.
- « Guillemets are often used in place of English quotation marks. »
There are plenty of other differences, some of which involve the spacing around punctuation. For instance, thin spaces separate guillemets from the text they enclose, and spaces are set before question marks, exclamation marks, and colons.
An article published by a Canadian law firm is set one way in French and another way in English. Despite all the little differences, note that even the French don’t use French spacing at the end of a sentence; even French lawyers don’t do it!
But French lawyers do have this in common with their Yankee counterparts — they don’t bother to hyphenate fully justified copy (and they do use Microsoft Word to set final copy).
