intl / l10n / number formatting

[rotdrop]

Is there any support for number locales different from EN/US? I know I can tell OpenTBS with e.g. ope=tbs:percent (or curr, etc.) that field is numeric. However, the number itself does not seem to be converted to the documents language.

Maybe related: if I format a cell in the template as percentage, the value will be displayed as zero after merging. In the XML I find something like this:

<table:table-cell table:style-name="Tabelle3.F3" office:value-type="percentage" office:value="0">
  <text:p text:style-name="P11">
    0.0068
  </text:p>
</table:table-cell>

So it seems that LibreOffice remembers the invalid number from the template, resulting from the TBS template field in square brackets. Also, if using e.g. German then we have a comma as decimal separator and a point to separate thousands, e.g. US 1,000.56 is 1.000,56 in German and a couple of other languages.

Is there any experience with OpenTBS in the context of non-US English?

Kind thanks for any hints!

[Skrol29]

Hi,
What is your template contents ? I mean with TBS fields. And what are you merging it with ?

[rotdrop]

Ok, this is the template with automatic sub-blocks and one column with ope=tbs:percent, but without adding the percent-formatting in the document:

template-sub-tables.odt

An example data-set would be (stripped down to one row, the sub-block stuff is working):

$data = [
  'placeholder' => 'This has been substituted',
  'outer' => [
    'col1' => 'Outer Row 1, Column 1 Data',
    'inner' => [
       'col1' => 0.005,
       'col2' => 'Inner Row 1, Column 2 Data',
    ],
  ], 
];

The data is also available in a simple OpenTBS command line app under https://github.com/rotdrop/opentbs-tool in the examples/ subdir.

The data is merged by replacing the data-source array of TBS with the given data and doing a block merge with the key 'outer' like $tbs->MergeBlock('outer', $data['outer']);

It works so far, the "percentage" numbers are then output as numbers in US or "C" notation with a dot as decimal divider-char. The output with a slightly more complicated data-set with more than on row is as follows:

template-sub-tables-opentbs-6dc0b337567915e0f670152d55bbe71c.odt

Here the document language is in principle German. The number is displayed without percent and with a decimal dot. Looking at the numer-format of the substituted document shows the table cell as "text" with "@" format character.

If I now start to format table cells as percent in LibreOffice things start to become complicated:

• after saving the OpenTBS tags are hidden, but not gone.
• if I format the table cell back to text, then the orignal text with the TBS-tags are not restored, but replaced by "0 %"
  So this does not work. Of course, the two points above are a LO "feature", this just means it can't be done this way, where "it" means: "display a number as percentage with the number format of the document locale".

Internationalization would really be nice as office-documents tend to be exchanged between non-nerds.

BTW: what would be the expected result? Should ope=tbe:percent ouput a percentage sign behind the number? And should the field type in the substituted document be adjusted to a numerical type?

I suppose I will now go and read a little bit more of the documentation; perhaps there is already something built-in to achieve what I want here.

[rotdrop]

Ok, so adding frm='0,000 %' seems to work. Then may I ask what actually "ope=tbs:percent" is doing? I get the desired result without it, by only specifying the format, and ope=tbs:percent alone does not hack it.

It would be nice if the default number formatting could somehow be styled according to the document language, instead of using the C locale by default.

Thank you for your work! I think using the format-options I get what I want to some extend.

[rotdrop]

frm='0,000. €' will give the expected output, e.g. 1234 is output as "1,234 €" without decimals, however, trying to exchange the role of dot and comma does not work, using the number format frm='0.000, €' with the same number results in "1234.000, €" instead of the expected "1.234 €". Surprisingly the format frm='0.000. €' with a trailing dot works.

The format frm='0,00 %' seems to work, i.e. "0.0068" is output as "0,68 %" (but regardless of ope=tbe:percent, but perhaps that is a feature).

Is this comma vs. dot feature somewhere documented? Is it even supported, or do I get the correct result by chance?

Kind thanks Claus