Re: [sc-dev] Proposal of a new format character from engineer's/scientist's prospective

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 04:56:22PM -0500, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> > So we have at least two different cases here, as you probably wouldn't 
> > want to display 0.1 as 10 cW when formatting as Watt.
>
> Right.  The example I've use above is just that, an example. ;)  What I
> think Calc needs to provide to a user is a mechanism to move the decimal
> point freely either to the left or to the right for display purposes
> without altering the value itself.  The unit portion can be specified by
> the user as a suffix string just like the current format code
> implementation.

Gnumeric is about to rework its format engine and could easily
provide  proving ground such an extension.  The key limitation is
finding the time to spec out how the format string would look.  I'll
initially propose something like

    [si,Unitstring]
which would prefix the supplied unitstring with the power of 3 si prefix
and
    [SI,Unitstring]
which would prefix the supplied unitstring with the si prefix

It seems kludgy but The [si] notation would at least fit with XL's
handling of currencies an am/pm.  I don't really like the si vs SI
though they won't localise well.  Nor do I have any ideas on how to
indicate binary powers.

Possibly [%Unitstring] with varying numbers of % for the different
conventions ?  That would match the  approach for months, and be
similar to currencies.

So far it seems like people would like to see
    - SI units for powers of 3 (W and mW but not cW)
    - SI units in general (m, cm, mm)
    - binary prefixes
    any more ?

Other Ideas ?