A French landing page goes live. The copy is accurate, the tone is right, but a question mark sits alone at the start of a line, a quotation appears inside straight double quotation marks, and a headline reads “ECONOMISEZ” rather than “ÉCONOMISEZ.”
None of those constitute a spelling mistake, but most francophone readers will notice. The French typography rules Quebec follows are what subtly indicates whether content was produced by someone who knows the language well or someone who ran it through an automated tool like ChatGPT.
This article covers the three areas where most errors crop up, the different conventions used in Quebec and France, and why typography tends to need a double-check after publication.
Why French Typography Signals Credibility
English typography is forgiving; French typography, however, is not, because spacing and punctuation are more tightly codified rather than purely stylistic, and the codes are published by recognized authorities.
The result is asymmetrical: An anglophone reader rarely notices a missing non-breaking space, but a francophone reader in Quebec might notice it immediately, the way an English reader would notice a lowercase “i” standing alone.
That asymmetry has a commercial consequence for bilingual organizations. The English version of a page can be assembled by a marketing generalist, whereas the French version cannot, and treating both using equivalent production tasks is how otherwise strong campaigns end up feeling translated.
Non-Breaking Spaces and Where They Actually Belong
A non-breaking space keeps two elements together on the same line. In HTML, the character entity is , and in most word processors, it is produced by holding Control + Shift and then tapping the space bar.
Of interesting note is that in typography, the French word for a space, espace, is feminine, while in all other contexts it’s masculine. This means that professionals write une espace insécable rather than un espace insécable. Using the correct gender in the right context reliably signals fluency.
The Office québécois de la langue française guidance on web typography sets out where non-breaking spaces are required and identifies the most frequent erroneous omissions:
- Always before a colon, followed by a breakable space
- Between a number and its unit or symbol, as in 45 %, 20 $ and 12 kg
- Inside French quotation marks, keeping them glued to the quoted text
- Between the elements of a date, a phone number or a large number
- After an abbreviation that must stay attached to what follows, such as “Dre Tremblay”
Where Quebec Diverges From France
This regional difference often catches European agencies and European-trained translators off guard.
In France, a thin space precedes the semicolon, the question mark and the exclamation mark. The Office québécois de la langue française spacing table opts instead for no space before those three signs, a practice it describes as widespread and tending toward convention.
The reason is practical: Many applications either cannot insert a thin space conveniently or fail to render it properly. The thin space stays acceptable where the software can handle it, but no space is the safe default option for content that will pass through a content management system (CMS).
The colon is the exception that stays constant: It is always preceded by a non-breaking space and followed by a breakable space in all regions.
Guillemets Are Not Quotation Marks
Nothing reveals a disregard for French typography rules faster than English quotation marks in French text. French uses guillemets, the angled marks shaped like an inverted V (« ABC »), not the straight or curly double quotation marks used in English.
The spacing convention matters as much as the character choice too: The opening guillemet is followed by a space while the closing one is preceded by a space, and both spaces should be non-breaking so the marks never end up alone on a line.
For a quotation nested inside another quotation, French uses English-style double quotes at the inner level. This is the only context where those characters belong in standard French running text.
| Element | Correct in Quebec French | Common error |
|---|---|---|
| Quotation marks | « texte » | “texte” or "texte" |
| Colon | Preceded by a non-breaking space (example : texte) | Preceded by no space or a breakable space |
| Before ? ! ; | No space, or a thin space | A breakable space, a thin space or a non-breakable space (following European French usage) |
| Percent | 45 % (with a non-breaking space) | 45% |
| Currency | 20 $ (with a non-breaking space) | $20 or 20$ |
| Apostrophe | Curved (e.g., l’entreprise) | Straight (e.g., l'entreprise) |
| Accented capitals | ÉCONOMISEZ, À PROPOS | ECONOMISEZ, A PROPOS |
| Acronyms | REER, ENAP | REÉR, ÉNAP |
| Emphasis | Italics, or bold for key facts | Underline (reserved for links) |
Need a second set of eyes on French content before it ships? Ask a quote for a review of your existing pages.
Accented Capital Letters Are Not Optional
The belief that French capitals drop their accents is a persistent myth, and in Quebec, it is simply incorrect.
The OQLF’s position on accents, diaereses and cedillas on capital letters is that a capital takes the acute, grave or circumflex accent, as well as the diaeresis and the cedilla, whenever its lowercase equivalent would have one. The rule applies to sentence-initial letters, abbreviations, full sentences and letters inside words set entirely in capitals.
Acronyms and initialisms are the exception, which is why REER (régime enregistré d’épargne-retraite) and ENAP (École nationale d’administration publique) should be written unaccented even though the expanded forms have them.
Two places where this rule frequently gets broken should be double-checked on every project: headlines in all caps, where a designer has typed directly into a graphic file, and navigation labels or button text, where a CMS field was filled in by someone working from an English wireframe.
Moreover, accents have an accessibility dimension as well. Screen readers depend on correct characters to pronounce words properly, and an unaccented capital can change how a term is read aloud. Search engines index the accented and unaccented forms differently too, which makes the correct spelling a small SEO ranking consideration in addition to a linguistic one.
French Typography May Not Survive Publication
Even if you apply French typography rules in the Word file, it may not show up correctly on the web page. This is how most published errors occur, and it is the reason a final check in the publishing environment is worth building into the schedule.
The recurring failure points are consistent: non-breaking spaces lost during CMS import or HTML export, meta titles and descriptions truncated at a spot that orphans punctuation, curved apostrophes converted to straight ones by a form field, accents stripped from text baked into images, text set entirely in capitals (which the OQLF advises against for web reading because it slows the reader down), and underlining used for emphasis when it should be reserved for hyperlinks.
None of these will be flagged by a spell checker; they will be noticed, however, when someone reads the live page, which is why a web quality assurance step is crucial.
The same logic applies upstream. Typography, alongside vocabulary and syntax, is part of what separates content adapted for the market from content merely translated into French. The broader picture is covered in this overview of Quebec market adaptation and this look at common English-to-French translation mistakes in Quebec businesses.
Make French Typography Rules Part of Your Final Check
Typography is one of the least expensive indicators of quality for French-language content, but also one of the easiest to overlook. Every rule mentioned here takes only a few seconds to apply at the writing stage, but can require hours of work to correct later on a website that has already been published.
Record the French typography rules that apply to your content in a short internal style sheet, give it to whoever fills in the CMS fields, and verify the rendered page rather than the source file. The reader will never notice when your spacing is correct, but they will when it is not.
Have French content that needs a typographic and linguistic review before launch? Reach out to discuss scope.
FAQ
Do French capital letters take accents under the French typography rules?
Yes. The French typography rules on this point are unambiguous: A capital letter takes the acute, grave or circumflex accent, along with the diaeresis and the cedilla, whenever its lowercase equivalent does. Abbreviations follow the same rule, so “Éd.” and “É.-U.” both keep their accents. Acronyms and initialisms are the only exception and stay unaccented, which is why “REER” and “ENAP” appear without any.
Is there a space before a question mark in Quebec French?
Not usually. Usage in France places a thin space before the question mark, the exclamation point and the semicolon, but the standard convention in Quebec omits this space (although it is permitted when technological tools allow it, or if the text is also released in a printed format). The colon behaves differently and is always preceded by a non-breaking space. Word processors that insert thin spaces automatically should have the feature disabled; otherwise they produce European spacing by default.
What is the difference between guillemets and quotation marks?
Guillemets are the angled marks « that look like this » used for quotations in French, while English relies on straight or curly double quotes. The opening guillemet is followed by a space and the closing one is preceded by a space, and both spaces should be non-breaking. English-style double quotes appear in French only at the inner level of a quotation already enclosed within guillemets; meaning that the inner French quotes enclose a quotation that itself refers to another source cited within that same primary quotation.