It is usual, in freench typography (and in french typewriting too, btw) to include an half-width, non-breaking space before "broken punctiation", i.e. [:;!?]. Some typsestting engines (e.g. TeX through the \frenchspacing declaration, and LaTeX through the \usepackage[francais]{babel} header), implement this convention. So the TeX source should not contain these spaces, that will be included by the rendering engine. Putting in and uot these spaces can of course be automated. What should be done to encode correctly a french text in TEI, and what is (should be) done by the text rendering engine? For french text in ISO-Latin it is customary to include a full non-breaking space, in Unicode half-width spaces should be used. Similar conventions apply for em-dashes; here however spaces can be broken, so half-width (breaking) spaces can be used instead. Carlo