[GNC] ISO 31-0 number writing

[David Carlson]

First, ISO 31-0 was withdrawn on 17 November 2009. It is superseded by ISO
80000-1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_80000-1>. Other parts of ISO 31
have also been withdrawn and replaced by parts of ISO 80000
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000>.

That standard suggests that large numbers with many digits be displayed as
groups of three separated by a small space instead of dots or commas.  We
do not have small space characters on our keyboards, so that will be
difficult to implement.

I would also argue that in the U.S. average persons will adopt small spaces
with the same fervor that they have adopted metric measures in general.

While it would be ok to adopt this convention as an alternate in GnuCash, I
am strongly against forcing the display  to omit dots or commas as
thousands separators.

>From Wikipedia " In Unicode <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>, thin
space is encoded at U+
<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Character_reference/2000-2FFF#ref_THSP>
2009   thin space (HTML   *·*  ). Unicode's U+
<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Character_reference/2000-2FFF#ref_NNBSP>
202F   narrow no-break space
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow_no-break_space> (HTML  )
is a non-breaking
space <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space> with a width
similar to that of the thin space."

That's my 2 ¢.

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 6:40 AM Fiable.biz via gnucash-user <
gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

> Hello.
> I suggest an option for the acceptance by GnuCash of the international
> notation of numbers, as defined by ISO 31-0 standard and the 22nd General
> Conference on Weights and Measures, which declared in 2003 that "the symbol
> for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma
> on the line" and further reaffirmed that "numbers may be divided in groups
> of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever
> inserted in the spaces between groups".81 235,67 and 81 235.67 have the
> same meaning and would both be accepted, but 81,235.67 would be refused.
> Presently space is neither accepted in importing nor in pasting into
> GnuCash. Moreover, if one has chosen the dot as decimal separator then the
> coma is refused and vice versa... So I very often have to modify files in
> LibreOffice before importing them into GnuCash, and to type figures I could
> just copy and paste.
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-- 
David Carlson