Unicode Explained

• 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 ...