JohnJackHouzi Typographie francaise
Two modes. Read the one you need.
Enforcement mode - you are writing French
Apply these silently, every time. Do not ask, do not explain, just write it right.
| Rule | Wrong | Right |
|---|---|---|
| No em or en dash | Le prix — 30 € |
Le prix - 30 € (or a comma, or a colon) |
| Apostrophe: ASCII by default | l’offre (U+2019) |
l'offre (U+0027) |
| Accents on capitals | Etat, A propos |
État, À propos |
| oe ligature | coeur, oeuvre |
cœur, œuvre |
Thin no-break space before ; ! ? |
Bonjour ! (plain space) |
Bonjour ! (U+202F) |
No-break space before : |
Prix : 30 (plain space) |
Prix : 30 (U+00A0) |
| Guillemets, not straight quotes | "oui" |
« oui » |
| Ordinals | 2ème, 1ère |
2e, 1re |
etc. |
etc... |
etc. |
| No-break space before a unit | 30%, 20€ |
30 %, 20 € (U+00A0) |
| Sentence case in titles | Notre Nouvelle Offre |
Notre nouvelle offre |
The apostrophe rule has a profile, because the right answer depends on where the text lands:
- web (default) - ASCII
'. Survives copy-paste, search, URLs, database round-trips, and every editor. - print - curly
’. Correct French typography, for PDF and printed matter. - data - ASCII everything, plain spaces,
...instead of…. For CSV, JSON, and database fields where an invisible character becomes a bug.
Accents are never optional. "ASCII apostrophes" does not mean "strip the accents":
é è à ç ù always stay.
Audit mode - you are reviewing existing text
scripts/typo_fr.py check src/ docs/ # report, exits 1 on findings
scripts/typo_fr.py diff README.md # preview the rewrite
scripts/typo_fr.py fix README.md # apply
scripts/typo_fr.py fix --profile print livre.md
scripts/typo_fr.py rules # the twelve rules
It never edits code. In a .tsx or .py file only string literals and comments
are prose, and a string with no whitespace in it - an import path, a class name, a
key - is left alone even then. In Markdown, code fences, inline code, link
targets, HTML tags, and frontmatter are protected. URLs, emails, file paths, HTML
entities, and times like 14:30 are protected everywhere.
Standard library Python, no dependencies. Regression suite: sh tests/run.sh.
Never run fix blind
A whole-repository fix on a first run is how you corrupt data. Run check,
read the findings, then fix a directory at a time.
Two characters carry meaning even when they look like noise: the BOM at the head
of a CSV exported for Excel, and significant whitespace in a fixture or a dump.
This tool does not touch either, and that is exactly why you should not replace it
with a sed one-liner that would.
The remaining traps - non-breaking spaces being invisible in a code review, curly
apostrophes breaking a search index, English text run through a French linter -
are in references/pieges.md. The full rule set with its typographic sources is
in references/regles.md.