Word X: Another example of poor French support

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 11th, 2003 • 11:06 pm

In the same vein as the previous item: in French (and Canadian French) typography, the colon punctuation mark (:) always comes with a non-breaking space before. Word “knows” this since it inserts that non-breaking space automatically for you if you have set the language of your document to French (or Canadian French) and are using the “Smart quotes” option in “AutoFormat As You Type” (yet another misnomer).

Yet, even if the “Use smart cut and paste” option is on, when you do the following:

  1. type a French word (Word #1) followed by a colon
  2. type another French word (Word #2) elsewhere
  3. double-click on Word #2 to SELECT it and copy it to the Clipboard (cmd-C)
  4. double-click on Word #1 to SELECT it (Word selects the trailing space as well, i.e. the non-breaking space that it automatically inserted before the colon)
  5. paste (cmd-V)

automatically Word replaces Word #1 with Word #2, but also removes the non-breaking space between the word and the colon that comes after it!

I constantly have to clean up after Word.


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