Number to Words and licencing

[John Ralls]

On Nov 2, 2013, at 1:37 PM, Thomas Troesch <ttroesch at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> John:
> 
> Thank you for your thoughtful response.
> 
> I had looked at ICU only for the purpose of number to words translation.  I just now took the time to review the scope of what it addresses, and I see how big a task it would be to incorporate ICU in general.  It seems to have clear advantages, but its much more work than I can, or probably should, do.  I'm not really familiar with NLS issues.  I took my very first look at a .po file just to get an idea about how things work now.
> 
> I'm focused on NLS for printing checks, and all I know about it is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque .  Do you think it would be at all practical to consider developing plug-ins for number to words based on locale settings?  Developing translations would be a very different process, but may be sufficiently interesting for some people.

Thomas,

The po files go with gettext. That’s the bit I’d leave alone, as I explained in my previous letter. If you leave that out and concentrate on formatting it becomes substantially less involved, but the implementor would need to have some understanding of how both libc and ICU work to be sure of doing it right.

As for the plugin, what’s wrong with the current number_to_words()? It’s already localized via gettext. What would you do differently?

Regards,
John Ralls