=> OT: French punctuation oddities

[James Harbeck]

>Damian, thanks for the experiment.
>
>MS Word (French) looks a little inconsistent?  It treats space before
>full stop as ungrammatical but space before question mark (or comma)
>as grammatical?  Or did I miss something earlier -- French practice
>is *not* to have a space before full stop but yes before question mark?

That's right. A space (some would say it should be a thin space) goes
before a question mark or an exclamation mark, but not everyone does
that, so it's considered optional -- actually, I deal with one client
who insists on spaces and another who insists on no spaces... But
never before a comma or period.

James Harbeck.

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