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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

The space should be an "espace fine" (espace is feminine in that context), meaning a smaller space (En Space) than the normal space (Em Space).

The En Space is non-breakable, but the normal non-breakable space is Em in length, and therefore improper.

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Note that em (current point size) and en (½ em) spaces are both wider than the regular space character (typically ¼ em). An espace fine insécable (narrow no-break space) is even smaller, usually as small as a Unicode thin space (⅕ or ⅙ em): https://jkorpela.fi/chars/spaces.html

Word, in French mode, inserts regular no-break spaces where narrow no-break spaces would be appropriate. I find this style rather irritating, but then again, I don’t read nearly enough French to get accustomed to it.

However, I do agree strongly with the late Jan Tschichold, who recommended thin spaces before question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons for other languages, too: https://www.courses.psu.edu/art/art101_jxm22/tschichold.html...

Ah, you're right, my translation of espace fine to En was incorrect, thanks for the correction.

An intriguing problem in typography is the patterns that spaces can form between words on different lines (called rivers); in traditional typography it is checked for but I don't know of any rendering engine that would do that automatically (in a browser, or on an e-reader for example).

I believe that both TeX (Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm) and InDesign (paragraph composer – expired US Patent 6,510,441) do this, so there is at least one open-source implementation that could be used as a starting point. Unfortunately though, the awareness for good and bad typography seems to be so low that this is probably not a priority for browser and e-reader vendors. It would be wonderful to have this as part of WeasyPrint or something similar.

TeX doesn't do this automatically, but is rare to see "rivers" in TeX produced publications due to the superiority of its paragraph building algorithm.

Hmmm, that's true: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espace_fine_ins%C3%A9cable

However, LibreOffice inserts a non-breaking space U+00A0 instead :(

So the French don't break their spaces, they cut them.

Reminds me of https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekat%C3%B6r

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