
• Quotation marks: double angle quotation marks (« bien »), double quotation
marks as in English (“bien”), and single quotation marks as in English (‘bien’),
with some differences in usage
Except for the character œ, the dash, and the curly quotation marks, French is covered
by the ISO Latin 1 character repertoire, and the Windows Latin 1 repertoire adds the
missing characters, as well as the euro sign, €.
However, there is an essential feature in French orthography that cannot be properly
addressed in plain text even using Unicode. The orthography rules require thin space
(espace fine) after or before some punctuation marks—e.g., before an exclamation
mark. Naturally, such a space should be nonbreaking. This problem is discussed in the
section “General Punctuation” in Chapter 8.
The letter œ, “oe” ligature, has often been written as the character pair “oe” due to
character code limitations. The letter œ was one of the reasons for defining the
ISO-8859-15 code (ISO Latin 9), which has not gained much popularity, since you can
use œ in windows-1252, and naturally in any Unicode encoding. A normal French
keyboard still has no key for œ, so some special technique is needed to type it.
There is no simple way to type æ either on a French keyboard. In practice, “ae” is very
often used instead, although the dictionary of the French Academy uses æ spellings.
MS Word helps in writing ...