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------- Additional comments from ir...@openoffice.org Tue Dec 14 08:55:57 +0000 2010 ------- That's all good and fine. I can see that there's a lot already done about these formats in other places as well. E.g. my $10 Casio Scientific calculator has a button to format numbers into Eng ... so the actual existing formatting algorithms are definitely numerous and even quite efficient. The "real" problem is how to save the format into the ODS file, so that next time it opens the same format is applied again. That's where we don't have an easy answer. Since the ODS file needs to be ODF compliant, we can't simply add whatever we require to it. It needs to go through a change in the Open Document Format specification. As I've stated in a previous post, the ODF does not allow anywhere to save the ###.00E+00 format string itself (like Excel's XLSX file type does). It converts the string back-and-forth into settings saved into the ODS file. These settings are the following (and _ONLY_ the following): - Number of decimal places (the .00 portion of the string translates to 2 in this setting) - 1000 grouping on / off - Minimum number of exponent digits (the E+00 translates to 2) - Minimum number of integer digits (the ### translates to 3 and back into 000) Therefore if the user formats as ###.00E+00, saves closes and reopens the file the format changes to 000.00E+00. Which then makes for values such as 1000 displayed as 100.00E+01 ... this is clearly incorrect. There was a suggestion to "trick" the formatting by using the 1000's grouping to denote that this is engineering format instead of scientific. Which would allow only a modification of the Calc program - instead of a mod to the ODF spec. But then we loose the ability to have 1000's grouping in "normal" scientific format. E.g. 0,000.00E+00 would get translated to ####.00E+00. Given this is probably an extreme example, it needs to be noted that we're loosing a possible format in favour of another. I'm all for the idea of allowing the grouping trick so the Eng format can happen right now. It just needs to be designed so that when and if the ODF specs finally get woken up to the "real" world ... we've not made ourselves a bigger hole than we find ourselves in now. E.g. what would then happen when the newer, correctly fixed version of Calc, opens an ODS file saved by this proposed intermediate version? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@sc.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@sc.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: allbugs-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: allbugs-h...@openoffice.org
