Reassigned to SBA.

I really often see that it seems to be common use to have a blank in front of
':' and ';' (may be others, too) in French texts. 

For further examples and information pls. see
<http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/global/technology/translation/style-guides/Guide_stylistique_francais.pdf>
Unfortunately there is no complete guideline for punctuation.

Currently I see this as an ENHANCEMENT request, because it is not so difficult
to insert the "nobreakspace" manually just when typing the text.

Unfortunately it seems that there is no easy workaround, autocorrect can't do
that because it only works for ' !', but not for '!'.

It's not "common" it's the official usage.

If you have any doubt about it you can order this short and cheap French
typography bible :

http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2743304820/403-5566083-6106818

(Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'imprimerie nationale, ISBN
2743304820: official French typography rules, from the administration in charge
of the French official document publishing monopoly)

Needless to say orphan punctuation marks at the start of a line are annoying
enough Word has been doing the autoreplace thing for ages.

(another maybe cleaner way to implement it would be to teach OO.o to never
autobreak a line before some punctuation marks, regardless of the presence of
spaces or not before it. But it would still probably suck for export-to-doc)

Changing to enhancement and confirming.

SBA: Please note that for the french quotation marks (« ») the leading/following
non-breaking space is already implemented. 
It looks like all "consisting of two parts" punctuation marks need this in
French, so ther is :;?! missing yet.
Reassigned to requirements

Duplicate.

*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 17169 ***

BA: Closed.