I don't think there is a source that will support my claim except that every South African uses the decimal point for currency and numeric values, even on legal documents. There is a government editorial style guide which the Ubuntu team apparently followed here (this document does not differentiate between currency and numeric values): http://www.gcis.gov.za/sites/default/files/editorial_styleguide_2011.pdf
I am not an expert on this subject and can only find blog posts covering the format of monetary values specifically. However, I have a number of examples where the official government guides are not followed: Microsoft Windows uses the comma separator for currency and the "." decimal point for numeric values for the South Africa English locale. The glibc team also uses the "." decimal point for South Africa English locale according to this blog: http://adrianfrith.com/2014/07/20 /getting-rid-of-the-decimal-comma-in-ubuntu Google Docs use the decimal point for both currency and numeric numbers even when selecting Afrikaans (I can't select English South Africa specifically so the next best option is Afrikaans, which is South African). LibreOffice also uses the "." decimal point for currency and numeric values when selecting English South Africa. I know the issue is more complex than just me claiming these things but we have to get a discussion going regarding this. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to langpack-locales in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1090288 Title: The locale file for en_ZA appears to have an error Status in “langpack-locales” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: I suspect there is a problem with the locale for South Africa. The locale file for en_ZA located in /usr/share/i18n/locales has the following settings: LC_Monetary ..... % "." mon_decimal_point "<U002C>" % "," mon_thousands_sep "<U00A0>" mon_grouping 3;3 positive_sign "" .... LC_NUMERIC % "." decimal_point "<U002C>" % "," thousands_sep "<U00A0>" grouping 3;3 END LC_NUMERIC - Unicode character <U002C> is for a comma "," and not a full stop "." It should be <U002E> - Unicode character <U00A0> is for a non-breaking space " " and not a comma "," . If it's meant to be a comma it should be <U002C> South Africa is on the metric system and uses a "." for decimal places. The above issue results in the regional settings having a comma in the decimal place and causes a number of errors when trying to use other software packages. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+bug/1090288/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
