French Fonts: Accented Capitals, Guillemets and Spacing

A font for French must render the actual wording rather than merely suggest a French visual mood. OQLF’s guidance says capitals retain the accents, diaereses and cedillas of their lowercase counterparts, with its stated exception for initialisms and acronyms. Keep É, À, Ç and other required forms in a headline instead of dropping marks to accommodate an incomplete display font. The OQLF capital-letter reference explains the orthographic purpose.

French punctuation spacing requires an editorial choice tied to the publication. OQLF explicitly prefers no space before semicolons, exclamation marks and question marks, while allowing a thin space where available. Its table separately specifies nonbreaking spaces for other contexts. Do not present one undifferentiated rule as obligatory across all French-language publishing. Record the chosen house style and consult the full spacing table before changing punctuation globally.

Build a sample from the final copy that includes an accented capital, an apostrophe and a quoted phrase. Compare Source Sans 3 and Lora below at the intended heading and body sizes; they are independent specimen families, not national classifications. Narrow the text column and watch both edges of the quotation. Check that any required nonbreaking spaces keep punctuation with its text, and that marks above capitals are not clipped by a tight line box.

Correct a missing accent in the source text rather than drawing it as a separate decorative shape. If a supplied letter renders differently from its neighbours, inspect whether another font is supplying it before choosing a replacement family. Recheck the exported document as well as the editing view. French Script MT is a separately named typeface; its name does not establish that it is the appropriate body font for a French document.