Talk:Sentence spacing/French spacing

Examples of house-style requirements

This entry could really use info on what formatting standards demand / reject french spacing. I have no idea. Rycanada 01:43, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Use on Wikipedia

Someone French-spaced the entry but Wikipedia formatting ignored it. Should we keep it, remove it, or format it so the entry is French spaced (this would be funny and self-referential, along with being my vote)? I've reverted it to traditional for now. Astrochris 05:45, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

What is the rule for Wikipedia. French spacing or not ? Hektor 12:00, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

It does not matter - the MediaWiki software suppress excess white space - example:

Sentences with French spacing.  Sentences with French spacing.  Sentences with French spacing.

is rendered as:

Sentences with French spacing. Sentences with French spacing. Sentences with French spacing.

and

Sentences without French spacing. Sentences without French spacing. Sentences without French spacing.

is rendered as:

Sentences without French spacing. Sentences without French spacing. Sentences without French spacing.

See? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:39, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually, this is a browser-imposed consequence of HTML's Display Standards, rather than MediaWiki-specific. All runs of consecutive spaces are collapsed to a single space at display-time. See the overhauled article for notes on how to force double-spacing in HTML/browsers. Saltation (talk) 23:22, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

It certainly does matter since Wikipedia is edited with tools that honor double spaces and the articles are likely to include other means of publication than through a web browser. So the question still stands, what is the policy on Wikipedia? -- Henriok (talk) 13:23, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there needs to be a policy. Probably more than 99.9% of writers are not going to try to research how to change the default spacing between sentences in Wikipedia while writing in HTML. You could call it an "unwritten policy" I suppose. However, policies are usually made when there is a clear need for them - in this case it would be needed if a disagreement existed or there was confusion. There is no confusion about inter-sentence spacing conventions when editing/writing Wikipedia articles. Airborne84 (talk) 15:17, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Article is wrong: "French spacing" means Continental-style single space after a full-stop

I think this article might have it backwards. As I recall, French spacing is the practice of only putting one space after the period. That is certainly the case in TeX, where the macro \frenchspacing makes TeX not enlarge spaces after periods.

That would be because the macro is telling TeX that the user is using French spacing. Expanding two spaces to four is obviously undesirable, so there is a macro to tell TeX to change its default behaviour. — Saxifrage ✎ 06:59, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

That explanation doesn't make any sense, because TeX, like HTML, suppresses multiple spaces (unless you force them with control sequences). —Blotwell 10:54, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I think TeX just has it wrong. The top page of results on google for "french spacing" all seem to be using it the same way this article does. And, unusually, only three of them are copies of this article! JulesH 15:32, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Is there any evidence that the double space between sentences was ever commonly used in France? I always thought of this as an exclusively U.S.-originated typographic fashion, which was practically unknown in Europe or non-English-language typography, at least before the influx of U.S.-developed typesetting software in the 1980s (including TeX). Markus Kuhn 14:00, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

This has little to do with the spacing customs actually practiced in France. In English there’s a term for it, and the term happens to be French spacing. Now, how many spaces that term refers to, I have no idea anymore. Looking at Google hits, I see people using the term in both the one-space and the two-space senses, and I don’t see either definition clearly dominating the other. If someone used the term with me, I’d probably assume two spaces, but I’d ask for clarification if I could. --Rob Kennedy 03:32, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I too believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with this article. After reading several French references on punctuation and spacing, it seems clear that (at least contemporary) French practice is the use of a single space after a sentence (same as in other Continental languages): [1] [2] [3]. This matches perfectly Knuth's use of the term "French spacing" and is the exact opposite of how this article describes it. It is true, however, that French uses a no-break space before semicolon, colon, exclamation mark and question mark (e.g. "On écrira : Attention !"), whereas English and many other languages do not. Markus Kuhn 18:19, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, none of your three links says anything about inter-sentence spacing. The first definitely doesn’t; for the other two, I’m relying on Google’s translation into English. They talk about whether to put space before other punctuation, such as colons and question marks. At best, the third link explicitly says to put space after a period. It doesn’t say how many spaces. --Rob Kennedy 03:32, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

This article is not about the French typography (that is, typographical practice in France) - it is about the typographical practice as employed in English which is termed "French spacing". As the article suggests, I suspect is has nothing to do with the French typography, and everything to do with "French" being used as an adjective for "fancy". -- ALoan (Talk) 09:29, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

The article did make much stronger claims about French typography until I edited to be more cautious yesterday. My main objection remains though. The article has only one single reference for the claim that in American typography, the term "French spacing" refers to the "fancy" practice of having a larger space at the end of a sentence, and that is merely a blog post (by John S. Rhodes) quoting an email (by Sam Harris) to that end. This single reference currently stands against the entire TeX community, which has for more than 20 years now used the term "French spacing" (\frenchspacing) to refer to the normal Continental-style single space at the end of a sentence, in contrast to "American typewriter spacing" or "non-French spacing" (\nonfrenchspacing), which uses two spaces at the end of each sentence. Given the very well-established use of the term in the TeX community, I believe that far better references (e.g. several well-established typography textbooks) are needed before the article can claim that the TeX terminology is not the most common one today. Markus Kuhn 11:04, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Marcus Kuhn's and the original anonymous poster's concerns are valid and their observations are correct.

The confusion has arisen from the relatively recent Americanization which reversed the meaning of French spacing, or at least attempted to. For some Americans in ~ the last decade, French spacing means double-spacing. For everyone else, and for ALL Americans before the mid-90s, French spacing means single-spacing.

I have overhauled the article to provide the (huge amount of) missing historical and factual information. Saltation (talk) 23:22, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Examples

This article could have some examples that explain french spacing. Especially the rules for quoting, like « Oh my god ! » ; this would be of great use. Also, the article is missing some information on why proportionally spaced fonts have made French spacing redundant. Thanks, --Abdull 12:22, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

We need a separate article on French punctuation or Punctuation in French. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:39, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Or better, on punctuation in other languages generally. The quotation mark page actually has a fantastic amount of information, but who's going to look there? —Blotwell 10:57, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

But I don't think most people who use French spacing in English would go so far as to take up other French conventions. I know I wouldn't. —Casey J. Morris 16:34, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

But they might be trying to research how punctuation works in French. Wikipedia isn't really supposed to be a how-to repository. — Saxifrage ✎ 21:06, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

It's a diffrent topic than this and doesn't really belong on the same page, so a disambiguation would be in order. I don't see how it makes it a "how-to" to focus on only that to which the term "French spacing" typically refers. —Casey J. Morris 22:58, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I thought you were suggesting that the only reason to have an article on French punctuation was so that people could use it, thus my comment that Wikipedia isn't about howtos. Rather, an article on French punctuation would be useful simply as an article about an encyclopedic subject. You mean your comment above is not an objection? — Saxifrage ✎ 06:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't object to the information's being on Wikipedia, I just object to it being here. —Casey J. Morris 01:54, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I've created a disambig page, moved this to French spacing (English) and done a rudimentary job on Punctuation in French. Feel free to comment.

The parentheses are absolutely unnecessary since the other page is named differently, so I object to that. And the Puncutuation in French article is so perfunctory and sloppy as to be useless. —Casey J. Morris 05:57, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

—CuiviénenT|C, Saturday, 13 May 2006 @ 02:34 UTC

Thanks for being bold, but I think we should move French spacing (English) back to French spacing, and add a "See also: Punctuation in French". -- ALoan (Talk) 20:10, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Is "French spacing" double or single space

I'm personally convinced that the term refers to double spaces, but I've done a survey of sources to see what we come up with.

Sources for double space

Apparently professional sources:

• http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/grammar/Typo3.html
• http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwriting/2006/12/french_spacing.html
• http://misterthorne.org/set_in_style/2007/01/27/legally-exceeding-a-limit/
• http://www.dynamicgraphics.com/dgm/Article/28654
• http://www.pma-online.org/scripts/shownews.cfm?id=1424

Non-professional sources:

• http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Bad_20Science_20Theme_20Park
• http://www.bmartin.co.uk/

Sources for single space

Non-professional sources:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/commentrss.aspx?PostID=488794 (n.b. article also mentions TeX so may be influenced by Knuth's definition)

Other sources

Comments at http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/tools/emacs/ltxmode/ltxmode.dif seem to imply that the \frenchspacing TeX macro is intended to emulate the punctuation style used in French text, which is not the subject of this article.

Conclusion

I think we can conclude that the vast majority of English-speakers, when they say "French spacing", are referring to double spacing, despite the fact that single spacing is typically used in French-language text. JulesH 18:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Removed

I've removed the dispute tag, due to the pretty conclusive search results seen above. I've also removed the assertion that the practice is only common in the US, because it was unsourced (and I've seen it in wide use in the UK as well, so is probably wrong too). JulesH 19:00, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

FWIW, the "conclusive search results" are actually one page - www.dynamicgraphics.com (and the author is simply mistaken). Two of the others are broken links, one is a blog, and one is a lawyer saying "I didn't know this was called French spacing until today". Bleargh. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.73.164.171 (talk) 10:30, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was Moved. —Centrx→talk • 02:43, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

French spacing (English) → French spacing – Disambiguation page unnecessary for a tangentially related article with a different title, a note at the top of the page would be more appropriate JulesH 16:14, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Survey

• Support move to French spacing, with dab header. Septentrionalis 16:34, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
• Support per Sept. It's unlikely that someone will look for French punctuation by typing "French spacing". Duja 09:39, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
• Support; someone looking for French spacing is obviously looking for French spacing. Zarel 20:35, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
• Support Just put a See Also at the top to point to the other page in the small chance that someone wants Punctuation in France, but types in French Spacing. Guitar freak 10 14:49, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
• Support If someone searches for "French spacing", they're almost certainly looking for this page, not French punctuation. - square_pear | talk 20:23, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
• Support Most likely page someone is looking for, even those who aren't can be satisfied by a simple header on the page.74.33.12.116 02:11, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• Support As per reasons above. --ozzmosis 06:32, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

• Note that there were two proposals for this change in the discussions above prior to beginning this discussion. JulesH 16:17, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.