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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

Typographic nerd: technically, you should you use a non-breaking space (espace insécable) before colons in french. Doing that does not show the popup. Wait, what do you mean your keyboard layout does not have it?

Keyboard layout nerd: you should use a keymap that has it. Like AFNOR's latest AZERTY or BÉPO.

Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I care now ?

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A narrow non-breaking space, please.

Of course, sorry.

> Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I care now ?

Because I don't want to switch locales in order to write short bits of text in another language. I don't even want to have to switch keyboard layouts -- just use compose sequences for diacritical marks and so on. And I don't use a French locale, but I do write French text sometimes.

I would imagine that in Europe this is a big deal. So many Europeans are multi-lingual... But you don't expect a Spaniard to switch to a French locale to write in French and vice-versa -- that's too disruptive.

Non-breaking spaces are transformed automatically when writing French by Word, LaTeX, and other text processors. Why would you want to learn the many ways of writing a spacing character, when your computer can do it for you?

Thanks for repeating the last sentence of my post in your own words :-)

Or you should use a line-breaking algorithm that does not suggest a break at that location. Line breaking is supposed to be tailored to language.

I'd agree, but this is even more subtle, as a sibling comment to yours said: the space is actually smaller. So text rendering should take this rule into account as well. But then you're assuming that you're doing single-language text rendering. Putting the character at writing time still seems like a simpler tradeoff (maybe with editing help like auto-replace or correction).

This is all a big pain in multi-lingual documents. What, am I supposed to switch locales every time I switch languages? No no, that's absolutely not OK.

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