Off-topic:
xmh hat geschrieben:
About accented capital letters:
- AZERTY keyboards don't have accented capital letters, you have to remember Alt sequences to get them (Á=Alt-181) or use charmap.exe or specialized software and frankly even if it may be worth to use them in some rare occasions where it helps to solve an ambigity, promoting their use is activism, IMHO very few french people feel concerned, I wasn't before release of Word95. :wink: Adobe don't use them, Firefox, OpenOffice, WIKIPÉDIA does. The same apply for special characters like "œ", « » instead of " ", '…' instead of '...', even apostrophe ’ should be used instead of ' but they are not mapped on the keyboard, you have to use a word processor.
Or you can also use a custom keyboard layout, which I have done and started
offering on my website in 2011. People just have to spend the 40 seconds it takes to open the page, download the layout, unzip it and install it. Making it the default (and only) keyboard layout for fr-FR takes another entire minute though. I'm not sure why, but all of that seems to be too much effort.
The layout file was built with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, which is available for download for free from Microsoft. Google is the friend of anybody who doesn't trust executables grabbed from random websites. It takes half a day to learn and master that little utility.
[EDIT]Once installed, the layout works in all and every program without any user actions at all.[/EDIT]
Last, I believe Azerty doesn't have the accents because the people who designed it weren't the most fit for the task. In software, the makers are often American or the target market is often North America. Hence, faulty localization such as "mardi octobre 20, 2014" in forum software or the complete lack of it (such as in The Walking Dead game on Steam, which can only be played with a Qwerty layout).
xmh hat geschrieben:
and frankly even if it may be worth to use them in some rare occasions where it helps to solve an ambigity, promoting their use is activism, IMHO very few french people feel concerned
True, very few French people feel concerned. In general, grammar mistakes have become pervasive and as such, acceptable. "je suis surpris" in a woman's mouth makes me cringe and it should make any speaker cringe.
But no, it's not "activism". There's never been a published dictionary, grammar book or reference text that didn't have ALL accents where they were supposed to be, even on upper case characters. This should be enough argument for ruling out activism. Unless, one doesn't feel concerned ("l'orthographe est un détail"…). It's the rule: "
L'accent a pleine valeur orthographique". We don't make them, we just have to abide by them.
Even if it were "activism", if there's anything that activism is called for, it's safeguarding a language that is ill-treated by its very speakers.
xmh hat geschrieben:
About punctuation:
- French rules tells that ':' and other dual part punctuation should be preceded by a non-breaking space, it's not the case in English I'm sometime confused.
Thank you for pointing out the "non-breaking" part of the rule. I hate to see it when there is a dangling colon at the beginning of some line on the Web because someone saw the "space" and left out the "non-breaking".
On-topic:
I hadn't been struck by the elements that @newlog pointed out. But I noticed that "Multi-synchronisation" had a capital letter and a hyphen when it actually shouldn't have any of these.
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, translator and publishing house manuscript editor.
Adobe don't use them, Firefox, OpenOffice, WIKIPÉDIA does. The same apply for special characters like "œ", « » instead of " ", '…' instead of '...', even apostrophe ’ should be used instead of ' but they are not mapped on the keyboard, you have to use a word processor.