At 13:06 -0500 15/07/2002, Gene Mechtly wrote: >On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Bill Potts wrote: > >> Strangely enough, when French sentences end in ? or !, there's a space >> before the punctuation. It can screw up line wrap no end in a word >> processor. > >Bill and Louis, > >Yes, I notice that Louis includes the space consistently, but I have never >observed problems with line wrap in his e-mail postings.
Each language seems to have its typographic rules when punctuation is at stake! In French the rules are as follows (xx denote letters, and - a space): xx,-xx xx.-xx xx-;-xx (xx;-xx is tolerated) xx-:-xx xx-!-xx (xx!-xx is tolerated) xx-?-xx (xx?-xx is tolerated) Of course the space before the punctuation (such as xx-!) runs the risk of rejecting the ! at the beginning of the next line, therefore you have to use a "espace non s�cable" (I don't know the English word). On my Mac under Word you get that with "shift-control-space" (sometimes I forget...) Apparently this does not create problems with the e-mailer I use (Eudora 5.1). Is it because in the settings I have checked the "word wrap" option? As a matter of fact it is only recently that I realized that in English there is no space before the ? ! ; and : Quite an intellectual gym when you switch from a language to another one! Louis
