Automatic French Punctuation Spacing Based on Language Settings
In French typography, it is standard practice to insert a narrow non-breaking space before certain punctuation marks such as colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, and question marks. While InDesign correctly applies French hyphenation and dictionary rules when the language is set to French, it does not automatically handle these essential spacing conventions. This omission often leads to typographic issues such as widowed punctuation at the end of lines, especially in justified text. Currently, users must manually apply non-breaking spaces or rely on GREP styles and Find/Change routines to correct these. It would greatly enhance multilingual typesetting workflows if InDesign automatically inserted appropriate non-breaking spacing for French punctuation when the language is set to French, in line with professional typographic standards.