Bugzilla – Bug 2659
Number separators are wrong in the German locale
Last modified: 2021-02-11 14:46:23 UTC
Created attachment 1082 [details] Separators wrong in Germal locale The number separators for decimals and thousands are (mostly) wrong in the German locale. The DIN specifies that the thousands separator should be a small-space and never a period as we have - and the decimal separator should be a "," comma. 1) In the Selection toolbar and the Timer toolbar if you set the format to Seconds you will observe that the separator used is "." period - this is wrong, it should be small-space. 2) In the Spectral Selection toolbar observe: a) in the Octaves field "," comma is correctly used as the decimal separator b) in the Hz field the decimal separator is wrongly "." period - it should be "," comma c) in the Hz field the thousands separator is wrongly "," period - it should be small-space. (Apart from any other consideration this means the Spectral Selection toolbar is inconsistent with in itself in its use of decimal separator). This may seem like a trivial cosmetic issue to sighted users but it has a big impact on VI users who rely on screen readers, as these number can than be read out incorrectly and confusingly. Two earlier bugs relate to this A) Bug #2613 >Selection bar sample display incorrectly in German here the fix we made was wrong B) Bug #2636 >No thousands separator in Spectral Selection toolbar Here, we didn't consider the impact on foreign locales (particularly German)
Although this bug is reported for Deutsch - as reported by Robert Hänggi on the devel email list This may also affect other languages - but I do hot have the language skills to check this. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Note that these separators are apparently coded in as part of the app. It would probably be better if they could be made as port of the translation *.po files and then each translator could adjust these to their own locale.
Robert wrote in the email thread > Now, the Din specification says: > DIN 1333 sieht die Verwendung des Punktes (.) zur Tausendertrennung > ausdrücklich nicht vor; EN ISO 80000 schließt jegliches Zeichen außer > dem kleinen Zwischenraum als Trennzeichen aus. > > This means that period (.) should never be used as thousand separator > and that actually only space is allowed for this purpose, or to be > exact a narrow space character.
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_grouping 1. For ease of reading, numbers with many digits may be divided into groups using a delimiter (Note it does not say "must be divided", it says "may".) 2. Since 2003,[28] the use of spaces as separators (for example: 20 000 and 1 000 000 for "twenty thousand" and "one million") has been officially endorsed by SI/ISO 31-0 standard,[29] as well as by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC),[30][31] the American Medical Association's widely followed AMA Manual of Style, and the Metrication Board, among others. I'd suggest that where we choose to use a separator at all, we follow the ISO / AMA standard.
Which "German" do you pick? Try this in Windows: 1) Go to "Control Panel" 2) Open "Region" 3) Pick the first "German" you see. Should be "German (Austria)" 4) Click "Additional Settings" 5) Look at the "Digit grouping" dropdown So, "German (Austria)" does use the "space", but try the rest of the "German" types. Austria - space Belgium - decimal Germany - decimal Italy - decimal Liechtenstein - apostrophe Luxembourg - decimal Switzerland - apostrophe Maybe we should be asking the operating system what we should be using since that's where the user can select and change what they prefer???
Testing on W10 with Audacity 3.0.0 11076f0 On W10 this appears to be fixed by the updated German translation. The thousands separator is thin space the decimal separator is "," comma Both are as expected.
Created attachment 1084 [details] No thousands separator on Mac Testing on macOS 11.2.1 Big Sur with Audacity 3.0.0 11076f0 This is still incorrect (and inconsistent with the recent change for Windows) a) the radix separator (decimal separator) remains correctly "," comma b) there is no thousands separator (see attachment) The lack of the thousands separator makes the number harder to read.
Mac locale residual logged as Bug #2662 >Mac: no thousands separator in toolbars: Timer, Selection or >Spectral Selection in Deutsch locale
