At 12:02 +0100 2002-02-22, Henk Gianotten wrote on the Typography List:
>The Americans (and the Brits) use a period as a decimal sign and separate
>thousand with a comma.
The Irish do as well...!
>The "old currencies" on the continent (German Mark, Dutch guilder, French
>frank) however use a period to devide the groups and a comma as a decimal
>sign.
Some use a full stop as the thousands separator and some use a
numeric (nonbreaking) space. Switzerland uses an apostrophe for the
thousands separator, I believe.
>We changed to euro and on the continent still have to use the comma as a
>decimal sign to separate euro and eurocent.
You in the Netherlands and others are expected not to have to change
the cultural convention you have for writing thousands and decimal
separators.
>Only in the US and the UK euro prices (on magazines and other international
>products) are combined with the period as a decimal sign and there are no
>spaces between eurosign and the first figure.
There should not be a space between a (symbolic) leading currency
sign and the figure, by convention in all the currencies that do so.
I don't know how many euro prices there are in the UK (which is not
in the eurozone). If the magazines and international products come
from the US, UK, or Ireland, it is reasonable to expect them to write
¤1,234.56 instead of ¤1.234,56 or ¤1 234,56.
>However since a few months the advertisers in the retailmarket in the
>Netherlands use the euro and a period to separate euro and eurocents
>instead of the comma.
Have you rung any of the type bureaus to ask why? You might start at
http://www.euro.nl to find someone to discuss about this. I'd be
interested to learn if there are solid recommendations for this.
>That creates sometimes confusion.
>Are the other European continental retailers doing the same?
I am given to understand that this shouldn't be done. I have put up a
page on euro sign formatting at
http://www.evertype.com/standards/euro/formats.html. There may be
errors in this; I am not sure what to do about spacing and Portugal
and Spain.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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