German Typography Rules
German, Austrian, and Swiss German publishing share a language family but differ in quotation practice, currency context, grouping, and the use of ß.
This page is written in English. The locale codes describe the text being typeset and the convention Avellio applies; they do not indicate the language of this web page.
At a glance
Quotation marks
DE expects „…“ and accepts »…« as an alternate house style; regional quote enforcement remains conservative.
Punctuation spacing
Ordinary German prose does not normally place a space before sentence punctuation.
Non-breaking spaces
Protect semantic pairs such as values and units according to the publication standard.
Dates
Day–month–year is the profile model.
Numbers
DE and DE AT use dot grouping with decimal comma; DE CH recognizes Swiss apostrophe-like grouping.
Currency
Germany and Austria expect € or EUR context; Swiss German expects CHF, Fr., or fr.
Units
A protected space between number and recognized unit is commonly expected.
Regional variants
DE CH flags ß where Swiss German normally uses ss. CH Mix is a separate conservative multilingual profile and does not apply that DE CH rule.
DEDE ATDE CHHouse-style caveat
Publishers may choose different guillemet direction or quote hierarchy; review the house style.
How to use this with Avellio
- Assign accurate InDesign paragraph languages before relying on AUTO.
- Use an explicit profile when one regional convention governs the complete scope.
- Run a new Typography Audit after changing locale.
- Read locale source, specificity, confidence, and context together.
- Correct ambiguous dates, numbers, currencies, and complete quote pairs manually.
References
- Avellio User Manual — Locale profile referenceAvellio product source
- Unicode CLDR — Number and currency patternsLocale data standard
- Unicode CLDR — Date and time patternsLocale data standard