In the image below, the spaces on either side of the colon should be even.

But that text looks to be the word "Clipping" plus a space, then a colon, then "Début". I wouldn't expect it to be even in that case.

If I separate those two words with just a colon I see the following, which is even:

Do you not see similar if you construct such text yourself? Just change an object name to the test text.

Activate translation, select French.. Mouseover on a Rotation value, and notice the “Radians : 0.000000” label is unbalanced.

But change to Spanish or Italian and see it is different. So this indicating a difference in the translated strings for French, not a problem with the font.

Hello Harley, in my image, there is the word “Clipping”, then a no-break space, then a colon, then an ordinary space, then “Début”.

I do see a difference between space and no-break space when I rename objects:

Here is the text for convenience:

Space : break
Space : no-break
Space : narrow no-break

In T99278#1382507, @Harley Acheson (harley) wrote:

But change to Spanish or Italian and see it is different. So this indicating a difference in the translated strings for French, not a problem with the font.

It is both: Spanish, Italian and English, like practically all languages using the latin alphabet, don’t use spaces before colons and other double punctuation marks. French on the other hand uses (overly specific) spaces. The current translation is using the proper spaces in most places, but the font doesn’t render them properly.

See this article for more info. Actually, I just learned that other countries chose the sensible option not to use those spaces…

Edit: this article is actually wrong: the punctuation marks use non-breaking spaces only before the mark, so that it’s never separated from the previous word and pushed to the next line.

I'm not arguing that there aren't typographical issues with our current font - there are. But I'd be waring of trying to fix any language-specific issues this way, since changing the spacing for colon would negatively affect other languages.

When examining the font for correctness, keep in mind that we are probably going to change it out for a newer version for 3.3 or 3.4. Since adding fallback support we would be breaking up our large font into separate language-specific fonts. details here:https://developer.blender.org/D15235. This would include a newer version of DejaVu: