French Placeholder Text Generator

Using it well

French Placeholder Text Generator, in practice

Apostrophes are where things break

French elides constantly — l'amitié, d'or, qu'on — so apostrophes appear far more often than in English. That matters if any part of your stack builds strings by concatenation or passes text through a template engine, because an unescaped apostrophe is a classic source of broken markup and SQL errors. French placeholder text finds those paths quickly.

Watch the typographic spacing

French typography puts a space before high punctuation: ! ? : ; and guillemets. Done properly it is a non-breaking space, so the punctuation never wraps onto its own line. If your CSS or text pipeline collapses or converts those spaces, you will see it in the rendered output.

Budget for expansion

French commonly runs 15–20% longer than the English source. Test the components with the least slack — buttons, tabs, table headers, and anything with a fixed width — before assuming the layout will hold.

Apostrophes break string handling first

French elides constantly, so apostrophes appear far more often than in English. Any code path that builds strings by concatenation, escapes for an inline attribute, or passes text through a template engine will meet them immediately. If a French string is going to break something in your stack, it usually breaks here rather than in the layout.

Quotation marks are guillemets

French uses angle quotation marks rather than the curly pair English uses, and they take a space on the inside. If your CMS or component library inserts typographic quotes automatically, it will almost certainly insert the English pair. That is a small detail that reads as carelessness to a French reader.

Capital letters keep their accents here too

The uppercase E with an acute accent is correct and expected at the start of a sentence, despite a persistent myth that French drops accents on capitals. Check that your display face has the glyph and that it does not collide with the line above, since accented capitals are taller than the cap height your line height was probably tuned for.