@stumped: In French, you do place a space between any "high punctuation" mark and the preceding word (i.e. exclamation points, question marks, colons, and semi-colons). I've also seen people using a space before "low punctuation" marks such as periods and commas though that is not standard.
I seem to remember that a thin non-breaking space (& # 8201; ) is recommended but too many fonts don't have that character so you get s�? for instance--depends on the .notdef glyph in the font.
|