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Old 04-21-2020, 06:21 AM   #38
Tex2002ans
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Join Date: Jul 2012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth View Post
The no space version is used, but not recommended in any style guide I looked at.
Many newspapers use that style, for example, The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian...-style-guide-t

Quote:
times

1am, 6.30pm, etc; 10 o’clock last night but 10pm yesterday; half past two, a quarter to three, 10 to 11, etc; 2hr 5min 6sec, etc; for 24-hour clock, 00.47, 23.59; noon, midnight (not 12 noon, 12 midnight or 12am, 12pm).
Also note, they use '.' to separate hours/minutes instead of the usual ':'.

You could also read a little more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_a...y_country#Time

There are about a bajillion different ways to write time, just like there are dates.

(Of course, 24 hour clock + YYYY/MM/DD is superior to all. )

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth View Post
Similarly numbers and the units are usually recommended to have a space, 30 mph or 6.0 kg. I use a regex to find numbers with letters immediately after and check.
Units (and SI Units in particular) follow different conventions.

Most of last year I typeset a Physics book, and I learned about all the nitty gritty of those rules.

According to BIPM/NIST, numbers should be attached to units with a THIN SPACE. You want to use thin so they'll display a bit closer together than your usual space:

See the minor difference:

6.0 kg
6.0 kg

"6.0 kg" should really be read as one whole chunk.

You also want it to be non-breakable. You don't want "6.0" to accidentally detach from the "kg" on a new line.

In ebooks, using non-breaking characters besides   is a very bad idea.

I would either go with the normal space or painstakingly add the   if it's deemed real important:

Code:
6.0 kg
6.0 kg
As to properly marking up source documents... I don't see a lot of properly Styled/written documents, I'm only working on things all secondhand.

And a lot of these conventions are geared towards Print, where you have full control over the layout... in ebooks, things are much different.

Side Note On Properly Typesetting Units: It'll probably be a blog post (one of these days...). I'll have to dig out all my notes from months ago, I did some pretty huge writeups with all my sources as I was typesetting the book.

I also took detailed images showing differences before/after, and the spacing issues becomes apparent when working on very dense books full of inline equations/maths/units.

On Tools to Help Correctly Space Units: If anyone's familiar with any to clean up directly in source documents, etc... let me know. The only one I have firsthand experience with is the grammarchecker Antidote, and it detects numbers+units, and is able to insert the correct spacing between.

(In 2018, I wrote a little bit about Antidote here: Does Tool Exist to Spellcheck/Grammarcheck by Category?)

* * *

Anyway, this conversation is meandering much further from the original post (alternate glyphs). I'd be very interested in discussing all these details, but maybe it should be in another topic. It's already hard enough for others finding all these fantastic nuggets of wisdom buried in strange topic names.

Last edited by Tex2002ans; 04-21-2020 at 06:28 AM.
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