French punctuation in Pages

Question

I wonder if anyone has seen the following problem already:
I just purchased Pages. I need to edit documents written in French. In French, quotation marks are not "" but two arrows, sort of like << and >>. Plus, there is a space after the open quote mark, e.g., << this quote >> and before the close quote.
Pages tells me that this sign is a form of a paragraph (in Special Characters). This is false.
Also, in French, colons and semi-colons and question marks have spaces before them, between the word and the punctuation mark.
Although I have gone through the Inspector in Pages to choose French as the language (Text + More + language), and also of course selected French as the language on the top right of the computer screen, still Pages will not apply French quotation marks or French punctuation.
Does this mean I have to go back to MS Word (which I would like to get away from)?
Je me demande si quelqu'un connaît la solution au problème suivant:
Je viens d'acheter Pages. Je travaille sur des documents écrits en français. En français, les guillemets ne sont pas des guillemets anglais "" mais des flèches << et >> . Qui plus est, il y a un espace après le guillemet ouvrant et avant le guillemet fermant.
Autre problème dans Pages: la ponctuation en français, pour le point-virgule et les deux points ( ; : ) et pour le point d'interrogation comporte un espace avant la marque de ponctuation.
Or, en dépit du choix de français comme langue dans Pages et la sélection du français en haut à droite de l'écran, Pages n'applique ni les guillemets français ni la ponctuation française.
Quelqu'un peut m'aider?
Merci d'avance.
Thomas

Answer 1

Thomas Dutoit wrote:
Yes, I have now done that, and Pages comes up in French, and the French quotation marks are also the default quotation marks.
As Yann pointed out,
You are no more efficient than Apple engineers
I type "Yvan" and yo copy it as "Yann"
Since 1943/12/31 I'm really attached to my true first name !
however, they are incorrectly typed because they come down with no spaces after the opening quote, and before the closing quote. In other words, a glaring error in a French language text, and thus completely unuseable. Of course, one can manually add spaces but then publisher typesetters will have all those to undo....
Sounds a bit surprising. If the spaces are available, the publisher tool is foolish if he add other ones.
I'm flabbergasted that something as basic as that is not right in Pages.
It's basic for a Frenchy of France. For others, it's an old foreign feature ;-(
How can it be sold?
(1) Because many users doesn't take care of that.
(2) because the localization is not treated seriously by Apple.
10 days after the delivery of Pages 4.0, I reported localization oddities.
The application is in version 4.0.2, some global oddities where corrected but localization ones are always here.
It's really pityful (of course our dear peterB will continue to claim that I always say that all what Apple does is perfect!)
Surely the software writers cannot have made such an error.
Who may introduced such a feature if it's not one of the software writers ? Maybe it's the road-sweeper
Yvan KOENIG (Vallauris, FRANCE samedi 8 août 2009 16:08:13)