Formatted as CP literals 123.456 means 123456 and 123.456,78 means 123456.78.
The "." is used for grouping 3 digits, the "," is the radix character (in German).
With the proposed rule it would be formatted as
It is interesting that OpenOffice (and also WordPerfect) treats it differently than MS Word.
In OpenOffice you can select any character as the radix character while in Word
it is always the global user's setting. I was asking myself if there is an explanation for this
"strange" behavior of Word.
My conclusion is that Word is optimized towards program generated data.
If you have a Word macro that fills in the data in a Word document that macro typically localizes the formatting
of numbers and the 'program' then works in any region. The 'input' is portable not the
'output'. This behavior cannot be achieved with Openoffice, I think.
Texts can be program generated in BlackBox too.
For example, I have a report generator for BlackBox but it is hard-coded to use german formatting only.
Currently there is no portable way to get the user's setting, I think, and there was no need so far to extend that.
But it is a limitation with respect to supporting localization.
(I certainly don't want to make it more complicated than required but I am trying to understand the
problems involved.)
For the implementation it should also be considered how decimal tabs can be converted to RTF and HTML.
Another issue is if the triangle+underline for a tab in a ruler shouldn't better be replaced by the
more usual symbols L, inverted T, etc.
And finally a question: in which case is the ":" required as the radix character?
- Josef