In French text many words are written with apostrophe and I realized that have no clue how much space should I leave after the apostrophe: d'autre, n'importe, qu'ils etc.
Maybe I shouldn't leave any space at all, but with some fonts it looks weird...

P.S. is there a rule for English words too?

Thank you very much!

 

In Italian, and in English,* there’s no space. I would say the same for French, but they have pretty specific rules regarding spaces and punctuation (like no space before |.|, but space before |:|), so I don’t dare giving you the wrong answer.

* However, historical usage could vary: http://typophile.com/node/122300

with some fonts it looks weird...

​That’s a kerning problem. I run into similar ones from time to time, because, for example, apostrophe usage in Italian is different from typical English usage, and the type designer didn’t (or couldn’t) take it in consideration when spacing the font.

Riccardo, thank you for your reply. I looked in "Elements of Typographic Style" of Bringhurst, but couldn't get a clear answer. And it is too time consuming to make a manual kerning when I type many pages of French text, there are way too many words with apostrophe. Is there a  way that I could do it through a setting of InDesign? because I am not aware of it. Thank you!

In InDesign one can use GREP styles within a paragraph style to automatically apply spacing changes to certain characters or character combinations. 

Looking at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe_(typographie)#En_fran.C3.A7ais there’s no space around apostrophes.

As for GREP and kerning, depending on your version of InDesign, you could find useful this guide: http://typophile.com/node/69252

Edited January 24, 201511 yr by Riccardo Sartori
testing HTML tags: it seems nothing fancy is allowed.

Riccardo, thank you for the valuable information. It seems that I can't escape manual kerning, though !

On 26 January 2015 at 9:24 AM, Tatiana Marza said:

Riccardo, thank you for the valuable information. It seems that I can't escape manual kerning, though !

You can, if you use GREP styles. I put together a How To Video which explains it. GREP might appear scary to some at first,  but with this video the kerning technique using GREP shouldn’t be too hard to be replicated and extended. 

And for the real geeks: here is an InDesign script that was suggested on YouTube:

http://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/kern.html

You set up the kernings changes in external files per font and when the script is run, the kerning changes are applied. 

Ralf, thank you so much for your video and for the above link.

Finally I know what GREP is:)