Talk:Non Breaking Spaces Before Punctuation In French (espaces insécables)

Brain-Storming

ES: the goal is to make a balance between "everything we can make perfect" and help as many people as possible who are missing this feature.

1. Provocative: Why do we implement this as a core feature while there's already a working extension for this (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/insecable)?
   Note: This extension only works for Writer.
   -> No need to download something extra for a function which should work from the start.
   -> As mentioned: the extension only works in Writer...
2. Scope: "French". In which country? France, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, others? Which references should we have?
   - France, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium: http://unicode.org/udhr/n/notes_fra.html
   - Canada: http://www.olf.gouv.qc.ca/RESSOURCES/ti/espacements_20030605.pdf.
3. Use always a simple non breaking space (HTML: &nbsp) or follow the subtle differentiations of the French typography rules using a so called "thin space" (espace fine) (HTML: &thinsp - which is a BREAKING space!) depending of the case?
   Note: MS-Word seems to (always) use the simple non breaking space...
   - Yes: the simple non breaking space will be used.
   1. And then re-work the implementation of "Tools - AutoCorrect Options - Custom Quotes" when French is the current character language?
4. Shouldn't we avoid to through a very language specific feature into the general AutoCorrect Options dialog? Create a new localized tab page?
   Yes. Both questions above find their answer in the AutoCorrect Options - Localized Options specification.

Exclusion of the NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F)

While the traditional typography usages recommend the use of a space called "espace fine insécable", their electronic implementation as NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F) character reveals many drawbacks:

• A minority of fonts contain this character
  
• Many software (browsers) don't handle this character as no-break space.
  This would lead to unexpected layouts when exporting to HTML.
  
• The original description of what "espace fine insécable" should be is not covered by the electronic standards.
  

See: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/french.html, Section "Spacing"
"The French language uses special spacing in connection with several punctuation characters, for example before an exclamation mark. For example, Lexique des Règles Typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie Nationale says that there should be a "½ cadratin" wide space after an opening quotation mark and before a closing quotation mark. That would half an em space, i.e. an en space. Quite obviously, such spaces should be non-breaking, but there is no non-breaking en space in Unicode!"

• The manual insertion (if needed) of this character requires much more manipulation ("Insert - Special Character") than a simple space ([Space] key) or the no-break space ([Ctrl+Shift+Space])

In Calc

Test with DEV300_m74, on WinXP.

• When entering time as data in a cell, replacement should not occur. For instance with 12:00 you get 12 :00 which is interpreted as text.
• You may need to enter references in cell such as: A1:A2 or A1;A2 which will give A1 :A2 or A1 ;A2