I think it’s fair to say that, objectively, there is a good chance that I know what I am talking about when it comes to French punctuation and typography. I am qualified to teach French (language and literature) in the French education system and, indeed, prior to my permanent move from France to Canada in the mid-90s, I worked for several years as a French professor in the French school system and in various university-level positions.
My initial training includes graduate and post-graduate degrees in French literature, stylistics and linguistics. I have been working for the past 11 years as a full-time English-to-French translator for the Nova Scotia Department of Education. I’d like to address these two points in greater detail here.įirst of all, I certainly wouldn’t want Erik to be forced to “trust” me regarding anything at this point in time, since we don’t know each other personally and his response to my post does not suggest that trust was part of his reaction to my comments on the bug and the quality of Microsoft’s products. Erik Schwiebert himself doesn’t know much about French typographic rules and cannot really be bothered to learn more about them-even though the software that he is supposed to have been working on in the past four years includes some essential automatic formatting features that are based on these very typographic rules, and these features are turned on by default and therefore, inevitably, used by millions of Microsoft users worldwide.Erik Schwiebert is not entirely sure that I know what I am talking about when I write about French typography and the use of the non-breaking space and therefore has to “trust” me when I say that this is a major bug.To me, these statements suggest two things: I am also not a native French speaker, nor am I familiar with the rules of French typography…īecause I am not well-versed in French typography (or any real typography for that matter) I can only trust that Pierre’s assessment of the importance of the non-breaking space in French documents is indeed high.
I am not the lead developer for Word, and I am not intimately familier with every bug that is entered against our products. In his response to my post about the bug with non-breaking spaces and Postscript (Type 1) fonts in Word 2004 yesterday, Microsoft developer Erik Schwiebert writes:
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