Exemplar punctuation in fr-FR

[Marcel Schneider via CLDR-Users]

Mark,

Thank you for looking into French exemplar character sets and helping complete with TC votes.
I greatly appreciated support of our work, but I didn’t look at it as a favor, just as a due response 
to our efforts. Hence I’m deeply disappointed that filing a ticket [1] I was prompted to file on ST
French forum triggered the withdrawal of your votes for a set of punctuation. I did not believe 
that TC would revert their decision, only wait for additional rationales prior to including the ASCII
apostrophe and the underscore, and eventually the horizontal bar U+2015. I didn’t think of these, 
especially the former two, as much of an issue, given the actual fr-FR Accepted Data already 
includes the ASCII quote and the at and number signs, and given the semantics of U+2015 is used 
in French, and use of #2015 is permitted there as per French translation of the Code Charts [2].

Now I’ve changed my mind and am only asking you to be so kind and just set back your vote for 
the set you devised, ie [!-#\&(-*,-/\:;?@\[\]§«»‐-—‘’“”†‡…‹›] where the last dash is U+2014.

For those unfamiliar with French data on CLDR, the Accepted value here is (as a full enumeration):
[\- ‐ – — , ; \: ! ? . … ’ " “ ” « » ( ) \[ \] § @ * / \& # † ‡]. The proposed value having now most 
support is [!-#\&-*,-/\:;?@\[\]_§«»‐-―‘’“”†‡…‹›]. Another proposed value that has actually less
support is [!-#\&(-*,-/\:;?@\[\]§«»‐–—’“”†‡…]
We see that the TC position is a good compromise between the two proposed sets.

TC’s decision of keeping the ASCII apostrophe off that list will be extremely useful to fight those 
who meanly tolerate and promote the use of U+0027 in publishing, eg on Wikipédia, especially 
in the spelling of entries. Regardless of a persisting keyboarding issue, online publishers can 
easily set up routines (bots) ensuring correct typography and more appropriate redirections.

Therefore I now welcome your initiative of locking APOSTROPHE out of French. I’m now able 
to tell communities that I honestly strived to make it legal for backwards compatibility, and 
that CLDR Chair and Unicode President Mark Davis [if quoting you by name is permitted in 
this context] assessed that idea as bad, and supports those in France who struggle against 
poor typography and lazy fallbacks. I know on Wikipédia many people will be glad.

Thanks a lot. And please be so kind and follow through. The data isn’t frozen yet.

Best regards,

Marcel


[1] http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/11332

[2] http://hapax.qc.ca/Tableaux-10.0/U2000.pdf

Please see also this proposal to make the data more comprehensive:
http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/11339