OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

office-formula message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: CONVERT - proposals and a new draft


CONVERT turns out to be really painful.  Neither Excel, nor OpenOffice.org help, nor Ecma properly document the units (Ecma seems worthless; it has egregious errors, and no details).

I'm going to post on the OASIS website a version of the last release, but with the CONVERT text modified.  You don't need to start with it, but I thought it'd be useful for others to have it available if you want to.

I've had to make a number of decisions that are debatable; below are the main ones.  They're debatable; if you disagree with any, please say so, nothing here is set in stone.

* The set of units is basically Excel + OpenOffice.org.  OpenOffice.org has FAR more, but some of them are so esoteric that I think we should NOT include them (list below).

* The set of decimal prefixes includes the _entire_ SI set, including Z, Y, z, and y.  It also adds "da", the CORRECT SI prefix, and deprecates "e", which OOo and Excel use but has actually never been the correct SI prefix.  But "e" is still there for interoperability with older documents.

* Where there's any possibility of misunderstanding, the text spells out what's meant.  E.G., not just "teaspoon", but WHICH teaspoon? WHICH mile (yes, there are many of them)? And so on.

* It adds bit (b) and byte (B).  The binary prefixes are new since CONVERT was originally developed, and given the increasing use of information technology, we need to start supporting its measurements.  The standard symbol for Becquerel is Bq, which doesn't interfere with B.

* I propose dropping several really-obscure or has-too-many-different-meanings units that are in OpenOffice.org 2.1 but not in Excel:
 - Temperature measure "Reau" is extremely rare; it was supported by OpenOffice.org 2.1, but there does not appear to be a need for all applications to support it for interoperability. Let's drop it.
 - Drop mass measure pweight - if this is supposed to be the pennyweight, it's got the wrong abbreviation (pennyweight is dwt), and OOo 2.1 gets it wrong anyway. CONVERT_ADD(1;"pweight";"grain") produces 21.88 but pennyweight should produce 24.  If it's not pennyweight, I don't know what it is.
 - Drop mass measures hweight, shweight.  Don't know what they are, and I doubt they're important.
 - Drop volume measures Schooner, Middy.   Australia's NSW Office of Fair Trading's  “Trade measurement and the sale of health products, food and alcohol” states that  “The colloquial terms, such as ‘seven’, ‘middy’ and ‘schooner’ do not indicate any particular size of glass. Traders should be aware that any advertising using such terms should be qualified by the indication of the actual size of the glass being used on the premises eg ‘middy’ (280 mL)  ‘middy’ (285 mL)  or ‘schooner’ (400 mL)  ‘schooner’ (425 mL).”   http://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/business/runningabusiness/trademeasurementsaleofhealthfoodalcohol.html
 - Drop volume measure “Glass”.  OpenOffice.org computes 1 Glass as 0.2 liters, i.e., =CONVERT_ADD(1;"Glass";"l") is 0.2.  Er, fine, but is this really an important measure? I doubt it.  Let's drop it, I doubt this is needed for interoperability.

Other unit names added:
“s” - second, because this is the standard SI abbreviation for this base unit while “sec” is deprecated
“smi” - statute mile, because U.S. maps are measured in this unit and it is different than an International mile
“acreif” (international acre) and “acresf” (U.S. survey/statute acre), to distinguish between these two definitions of acre.
“L” - liter, because this is the standard NIST-recommended abbreviation for liter in U.S.  The lowercase “l”, while used, is easily confused with the digit “1”.
“tspm” - modern/metric teaspoon, because the definition of “teaspoon” has changed
“pc” - official abbreviation of parsec (CONVERT only supports abbreviated prefixes, so to use the correct units it must support abbreviated unit names as well)
“ly” - light-year, a very common astronomical length measurement (it did not make sense to have parsec but not light-year).  There are varying lengths of the year for light-year; the one recommended by the IAU is used (365.25 days)
“m/hr” and “m/sec” were added (“m/h” and “m/s” were already in OpenOffice.org 2.1), to be consistent with the “hr” and “sec” abbreviations.

I didn't add a "modern/metric tablespoon"; in most countries it's 15mL, but in Australia it's officially 20mL.  Ugh.

Ecma screws up horsepower and Pascals.

--- David A. Wheeler 


[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]