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Hi. So I'm stuck and any pulling my hair out looking for a solution. Any help would be great!
I'm working with a a fairly long document (500+ pages) in English and Franch languages.
In French, a space is required both before and after all two- (or more) part punctuation marks and symbols, including : ; « » ! ? % $ #
Seeing that there is that space (in this text it's just a regular space) how can I avoid a line starting with one of the characters (! ? « ») or having a « left alone on a line?
I hope I was clear enough in my question. ty 😉
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You could do it with tracking.
«(?=.)|.(?=»)
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No space is required here.
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In French, a space is required both before and after all two- (or more) part punctuation marks and symbols, including : ; « » ! ? % $ #
Actually, it's a little bit more complicated: French typographic rules use a thin space before the question mark, the exclamation mark and the semicolon (! ? 😉 and a fixed width nonbreaking space before the colon (:), percent sign, currency signs, a closing quote (») and after an opening quote («).
You can run different find-change to replace the existing spaces by either thin spaces or fixed width non breaking spaces
You also can run a GREP find change to find in a single search question markks, exclamation marks and semicolons or percent sign, currency signs and other.
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To replace ordinary spaces by thin spaces before ; or ? or !
Find
(?=[?!;])
Replace by
~<
To replace normal spaces with fixed width non breaking spaces before :, €, $, %
Find
(?=[$€%])
Replace by
~s
To find an ordinary space following an opening quote:
(?<=«) and replace by ~<
To find an ordinary space followed by a closing quote:
(?=») and replace by ~<
How do you keep them with the text they are punctuating?
These spaces are non breaking spaces, so they automatically will be kept with the following signs.
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Yes, changing the spacing types was the key. I should have thought of that but I didn't.
Changing spaces to non breaking spaces is just what I needed to resolve the issue of these hanging punctuation symbols. Thank you!