From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 17:11:27 CST
De : "Johannes Bergerhausen" <johannes@bergerhausen.com>
> Am 01.04.2005 um 13:53 schrieb John Wilcock:
>
> > Even today the degree sign is on French PC keyboards, the masculine
> > ordinal is not.
>
> On PC, the Masculine Ordinal should be at ALT GR 0186 (source:
> FontBook, Berlin)
>
> > I see N° quite literally every day in documents we receive for
> > translation, never Nº or ?.
>
> Even if we see something every day this will not mean that it is
> correct.
> In France, nearly everybody is typing: »Place d'Italie« or even Place
> d´Italie«.
??? In French, the angle quotation marks are written like:
« this » (the mandatory spacing between the quotation marks and the quoted text is non-breaking, and thiner than NBSP, its French name is a "fine", and it is used also before colon, semi-colon, exlamation and interrogation points, and around quoted texts surrounded by em-dash punctuations.
When this thin non-breaking space is not available (for example in legacy or plain-text documents using legacy encodings), it is replaced by NBSP as a work-around (this convention is also used with fixed-width fonts, and was used on old mechanical typewriters).
When several paragraphs are quoted:
- the first paragraph starts with «&fine;
- all but the last paragraph have no ending quotation mark.
- the second to last paragraphs start with »&fine;
- the last paragraph ends with &fine;»
These conventions with angle-quotation marks and thin spaces also apply when other quotation marks are used, for example with quoted text within another quoted text.
Angle quotation marks are used preferable to quote complete sentences. When quoting single words or small expressions, these angle quotation marks are most often replaced by thiner quotation marks like double 6-shaped and souble 9-shaped marks (in that case the thin space is not always marked.
Single 6-shaped and single 9-shaped quotations should not be used with French as they interact badly with apostrophes.
However, it is recommanded in French to inclede the word with a mandatory abbreviation marked by the apostrophe within the quotation, even if this word is not part of the logical quotation -- this case only happens in practice with articles and pronouns with an ellided final e.
There are two styles of angle quotation marks:
- the classical form (learned at school) uses x-height marks on the baseline, or
- quite commonly with a smaller height and a high position (on the middle of the x-height line and the baseline), aligned to the top of the M-height line. (this small high form is found sometimes in hadnwritten text, and in some publications notably within text in italic or slanted style, or with cursive fonts, or written with capitals).
This second style is quite similar to:
<sup>«&fine;</sup>Quoted Text<sup>&fine;»</sup>
However, the too forms are normally not mixed in the same text, with the same font style and height.
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