Which space should one use before punctuation ? Does it depends on the technology?

Question

French puts extra spacing between words and certain punctuation marks including *?*.But should it be a space, a half a space, or a non-breaking space (`&nbsp`) technically? Or does it vary between seen handwriting, old-fashioned typewriters, typesetting, ASCII ^{(or ISO 8859-1)}, Unicode, HTML, TeX / LaTeX?I seem to recall of once reading of spaces of various fractional sizes besides half - can that be right?

Answer 1

I believe it depends on the technology you are using. In France, I was always taught to put two spaces after a period. However, in the last 5-7 years, depending on which technology you use, it seems the common usage now is that the program adds an extra space before the period and only one after. Similarly, in front of an exclamation point, colon, semi-colon, etc. it seems technology puts two spaces before the punctuation. I have never seen half-spaces, non breaking space, etc.

Hope this helps,

Colette