Happy Easter and good morning!
This is about the French version translated by openBrain of my Sketcher document. When typesetting I came across some special french guidelines and would like to ask, if it is the right way to typeset. The typesetting follows the "Lexiquedes règles typographiques en usage à l’Imprimerie Nationale”, but there are some questions left, if it is appropriate for such a rather technical document.
- Quotes (Guillemets)
Which quotes should be used to distinguish special items. Should I use the guillemets as I have done for Contraintes auto and Éviter les contraintes auto redondantes at the top of the image or the double quotes as in "Ligne" at the bottom? If I understand it well, the latter should be used if occurring inside of a guillemets-enclosed section, but I'm not sure.
A different approach would avoid the quoting and replace it e.g with italics.
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 08.02.27.png (118.47 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- Indentation
Normally the first line of a paragraph should be indented. Should I do this here as well despite the sometimes very short paragraphs and the technical nature of the document. The images show the differences:
- With additional indentation
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 08.43.49.png (142.32 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- Without indentation
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 08.44.33.png (134.41 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- Emdashes
In English writing the emdashes seperating different parts of a sentence similar to a comma are longer and are written without space between the words. In french they seem to be slightly shorter and have spaces. Then there are the very short dashes, which are used to denote a sequence in the following image. How should they be distinguished? For now I have reduced the spacing around the short dashes:
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 10.12.10.png (31.59 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- No additional space after a dot ending a sentence (spaces were probably all used up before these characters ? : ! ; ... )
- Bullet lists
In English and German documents bullet lists have on top level bullets, and on deeper nesting levels different symbols. In French only dashes with different indentations are used. Is this appropriate here as well?
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 10.52.16.png (143.67 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- Dot in description lists
In the following image the bold description items end with a dot. In German this is unusual. How is it in French?
- Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-12 um 10.23.40.png (225.67 KiB) Viewed 3890 times
- Number format
Numbers will be typeset as 8,09 instead of 8.09
- degree symbol
I have read that for temperatures there is always a space between the number and the degree symbol (20 ° C), while for alcoholic strength no space is added (13°). I'm talking only about angles and would like to know if space has to be added there too?
Please note that I want to make it as good as possible, not necessaryly efficient. Many of the things described can be done automatically anyway.
It was already difficult for me to write this in English, and my French is not sufficient for a post in the French forum. It would be very kind if one of the french members could forward this to the french forum, so that users not being spoiled by too much English can participate in the discussion. You won't have to translate it back, hopefully my French is good enough to understand.