documenting subtraction

[Chris Good]

From: John Ralls [mailto:jralls at ceridwen.fremont.ca.us] 
Sent: Saturday, 26 November 2016 2:55 PM
To: Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au>
Cc: GnuCash Developers <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: documenting subtraction

 

 

On Nov 25, 2016, at 6:09 PM, Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au <mailto:chris.good at ozemail.com.au> > wrote:

 

Hi John,

 

The punctuation guide [1] you kindly pointed me too recently does not mention using hyphens in mathematical formulas AFAICS.

In the guide selling section is uses:

GROSS_SALE-TOTALBUY-COMMISSION

and I would like to change that to

GROSS_SALE - TOTALBUY – COMMISSION   (spaces around hyphen)

OK?

 

[1] http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/about-this-guide.html

 

Chris,

 

Yeah, punctuation generally means "natural language" rather than "math" (or "maths" if you prefer). I do think it's normal in typesetting formulae to have spaces around operators and I agree that it makes the formula more readable in this case.

 

BUT don't use the text you used here: There's an en-dash (U+2013) between TOTALBUY and COMMISSION.

 

As I've told you before, the typographically correct symbol to use is − (U+2212, −)) but the ASCII hyphen-minus - (U+002d) that you used between GROSS_SALE and TOTALBUY is commonly used and is fine. Whichever you use should be the same at least on the whole page.

 

Regards,

John Ralls

 

John,

 

Darn, I fell afoul of Outlook autocorrect and autoformat options again. I’m sure I had already fixed those…

Why it changed one but not the other I’ve got no idea.

 

I’ve done a little searching on the internet - very interesting.

I’ll change these uses to −.

 

Thanks,

Chris Good

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4817 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/attachments/20161127/7246c8e3/attachment.p7s>