French quotes error

[Wosven]

Hi,

There's errors in the option to automatically replace quotes in French.

We only use as double quote "«" and "»". This means to replace "a" by « a »with non-breaking spaces between the quotes and the character:

• moderatly smaller non-breaking spaces with fixed width
• or simple non-breaking spaces depending of school

If we need quotes in quotes, there're again 2 schools:

• « Same double quotes « in quotes » that can be confusing »
• « Or using English “curly quotes and why not, but it's uncommon, ‘single quotes’ in quotes” in quotes »

 Last one, we use a lot of  apostrophes between characters, c’est la vie !

The automatically replace quotes setting is unusable for now in French, since it's replacing single quotes and apostrophes by › or ‹. We never use those. Wikipedia is wrong, and we can't see any mention of those ‹› in Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie nationale that is a one of the reference books about orthotypographie… There's a mention ( « guillemets simples » ?… Les ‹ chevrons › ?) at the bottom of this page, but it's ironic.

And if you want more proofs, search "›" or "‹" in Google: you'll have smileys, unicode char list, japanese pages, etc. but no French web pages as results .

[Pauls]

Have you tried disabling the option in Preferences/Auto Correct/Support language dependent single typographic quotes ?

[Wosven]

Hi @Pauls ,

That's not really the problem, the problem is autocorrection replacing with incorrect ponctuation.

I'm one of those crazy girl that 'd rather use alt+0145 … alt+0187 than letting an app "autocorrect" some text most of the time, but normal people use this feature and it would be better if if was behaving as we, French ones, expect  

[Wosven]

But it's a bug and should be logged as such and corrected.

[lacerto]

(...)

[lacerto]

(...)

[Wosven]

9 hours ago, Lagarto said:

If it is an autocorrection, I'd imagine it can be disabled from the Preferences.

Yes, it is.  And there's not shortcut to enable/disable it. It would be usefull to have more options: it could be effective when pasting text too, a shortcut to enable or disable it (in this case, it would be needed, since sometimes we paste copyproofed text we don't want to be modified, sometimes text from emails or not copyproofed that need to be corrected, especially not curly quotes. (You need to be an advanced keyboard user or to know some tricks, or to be helped by yours apps, if you want to insert specials french characters on a PC's french keyboards, it's easier on Mac).

People need to use clever tricks like glyphes browsers, copying-pasting from another app, writting in another app that'll auto-correct the text or learn and use the alt+xxxx combinations, etc.

That's why having this bug corrected is important and can help grow French customers

Using US/UK quotes in French is an error and frown upon, but it's the default behaviour of our keyboards, that's why it would be better if it was debugged.

 

 

9 hours ago, Lagarto said:

chevrons are used as single quotes e.g. in Swiss French

Yes, but French French don't! For this setting, it should be a new option labelled "Swiss French".

Suppose each time you hit ' or ", the app insert a Chinese character… it would be a bug.
And it's a double bug in French since it's replacing quotes and apostrophes by single chevrons.

 

9 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Affinity Publisher also does insert a narrow non-breaking space between the quotation mark

Yes! That's good

It need to add them too before !, ? and ;. There're other cases when we add them or to keep some words together. It'll be easier when we'll be able to use some scripts to do this or some specific editing.

[Wosven]

Bump!

Please, add this to the bug list, I don't understand why it's not corrected.

[jjk]

quotation mark

On 7/31/2019 at 10:31 PM, Wosven said:

It need to add them too before !, ? and ;.

Yes, it should be automatic, otherwise we have to add them manually.

And it would be still better if they were inserted when importing text.

[Wosven]

51 minutes ago, jjk said:

And it would be still better if they were inserted when importing text.

It only should be an option easily enabled or disabled, I don't like program messing my text without being able to check what is done (I usually prefer smaller fixed width spaces, when an automated app will add different ones), or use scripts where I can check what is done or not.

[Wosven]

Update:

I had to disable long ago some preferences like "support language dependent single typographic quotes", since the result was erronous, adding a single chevron, but as reported by @Pyanepsion, it's not corrected completely, since it's adding an unecessary space: