An English Guide to French typography
This article is written for English-speaking people who want to get the big picture about french typography. This short guide is mainly based on the work of Jacques André.
French alphabet
Let’s take a look at the french alphabet.
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z à â é è ê ë î ï ô ù û ÿ ç æ œ
Notes:
- The letter “ù” is only used in the word: “où”
- The letter “ü” is very rare and is only used in old or foreign words like “Bienvenüe” or “Capharnaüm”
- You won’t find the letter “ÿ” anywhere but in proper names, such as “L’Haÿe” or old proper names which became nouns, like “Aÿ”, a kind of Champagne.
- There is a difference between “œ” and “oe”. Same for “æ” and “ae”.
- It is possible to type accents on uppercase characters. Besides, all these accented uppercase characters (É, Ô, Ç) are rendered perfectly with any sensible font so use them.
Typographic symbols
French typographic symbols are really different than the ones in English typography.
- The guillemet: « » is the french equivalent of the english “ ” or ‘ ’. It is used to quote sentences. Note that there shold be a non-breaking space after ‘«’ and before ‘»’. Example: Il a dit : « C’est incroyable ! »
- There should be a non-breaking space before ‘:’, ‘;’, ‘!’, ‘?’. Ex: “Comment allez-vous ?”. Note that this doesn’t apply to French Canadian typography, and tends to become out of fashion in French, as some newspapers don’t follow this rule anymore.
- Three different kind of dashes are used:
- A short dash ( – ) for the “trait d’union” or the separation of the word in the end of a line
- An endash ( – ) for the minus sign
- An emdash ( — ) for list elements or incises (although it tends to be replaced by the endash)
Things to avoid:
- The bullet ( • ) is typically English and was never used in French before people start using Microsoft Word. You can replace these bullets by endashes or emdashes
- Don’t use a slash “/”. instead of “ou” (“or” in french). “ou” is short enough already.
- Besides, “et/ou” (and/or) or “ou/et” (or/and) doesn’t make sense in french. It doesn’t mean anything more than “ou”, as the french “or” is inclusive.
Usual Abbreviations
- Monsieur: M.
- Madame: Mme
- Messieurs: MM.
- Mademoiselle: Mlle
- Premier: 1er, 1er
- Première: 1re, 1re
- Premières: 1res, 1res
- Deuxième: 2e, 2e
- Numero: no, No. Use the superscript form of the letter ‘o’, this is not the ‘degree’ sign.
- Numeros: nos, Nos
- Page: p.
Word cut or “Césure”
You can cut a word if it doesn’t fit in the line with a short dash called division. If possible this word cut should be avoided. Also you shouldn’t use it more than 3 successive times.
The rules are:
- For simple words, cut syllable by syllable. Ex: “cla-vier”, “man-ger”.
- For complex words, cut in taking care of the word’s origins. For instance “homogène” comes from “homo” and “gène”. Thus you would cut it this way: “homo-gène”.
Latin locutions
- e.g.: p. ex
- et alii, et al.: et co-auteurs, et coll., etc.
- id est, i.e.: c’est-à-dire, c.-à-d.
- versus, vs: contre, « – »
Capitalisation
Capitalisation is a big tricky thing in french. Let’s try to make it simple. First, there is a difference between CAPITAL LETTERS and Uppercase letters.
- For the beginnings
- The beginnings of sentences are capitalised. Ex: “La traduction laisse à désirer”.
- No capitalisation for the first word inside quotes. Ex: “Il a dit « viens m’aider » “
- No capitalisation for the first word inside brackets. And even better, don’t use brackets. Text between brackets in french isn’t supposed to be a sentence. Ex: “Ceci est une phrase (Et ceci est une explication)” is wrong. It should at least be “Ceci est une phrase (et ceci est une explication)” or even better “Ceci est une phrase ; ceci est une explication”.
- Titles: Don’t capitalise every first letter in a word in titles. For example “Compte-rendu de la Réunion du 15 Janvier” is wrong and should be written “Compte-rendu de la réunion du 15 janvier”.
- You can accentuate:
- After a dot ‘.’
- After a colon ‘:’
- For “Madame”, “Monsieur”, “Mademoiselle” when they substitute a proper name. Ex: “Veuillez agréer, Madame, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués” ** Some words: l‘État, l’Académie, l’Univers, le Sénat, la Cour des comptes, l’Université (but “l’université de Londres” doesn’t need capitalisation), etc. ;
- Note that the capital letters should be accentuated. Not accentuating capital letters was a tolerance at the time of old typewriters, but now with our computers we have no reasons not to do it.