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Lisa Bronson wondered: <<I am formatting a French version of one of my
manuals. I don't know French, I'm just comparing it side by side to the
English version and making sure page breaks are logical, figure
captions don't flow to the next page, and that sort of thing... I'm
surprised by the extremely ragged right edges that are resulting,
because many of the French words are so long.>>
That's simply poor typesetting setup, not French style. You can
certainly hyphenate French words to avoid horribly ragged right
margins; I've used actual (Canadian) government-issue hyphenation
dictionaries to do this manually those times when I get to indulge my
taste in good typography, but any modern DTP software should provide
dictionary-based hyphenation that will do a credible job automatically.
For what it's worth, even technical French shouldn't really have that
many more long words than English. I haven't seen this in my field
(forestry) in nearly 20 years of working bilingually; needless to say,
"your field may vary".
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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