[ben_]

Cool article but this first bit threw me off

> The interpunct is still in use today—it’s the official decimal point in British currency (£9·99)

When the linked wiki specifically points out that it isn't:

> In British typography, the space dot was once used as the formal decimal point.

[jonathanlydall]

Fun fact, Windows 8 changed the decimal separator for the South African locale from a period to a comma.

My theory is that some academic or idiot government official told Microsoft they're not using the official separator who duly fixed it. But in practice every "normal" person in the country used a period as a separator.

By default, Excel now uses a comma separator for decimals. Which unless I change it, makes it especially fun when I want to paste values into my banking website which (like most of the country) uses a period as a separator.

Really, it would have been way more pragmatic if South Africa just changed its official decimal separator.

It also caused some annoying issues on our .NET with SQL Server software project. For example SQL seed scripts inserting decimal values would break depending on if they were being run on Windows 7 or 8. On the upside, it did teach us all to have our code be properly locale aware.

[benjijay]

Tangentially reminds me of how, in an early build of Win11, the localisation team at M$ changed 'zip' to 'postcode' for the GB language pack

People then had a lot of fun being unable to extract their .postcode archive files which suddenly came into existence...

[ygra]

AFAIR it was the localized name of the file type. File extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.

[lproven]

> File extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.

Yeah they did. Notably, Microsoft did it.

Source: me. I spent 3 hours at the Venezuelan Embassy in London trying to get Microsoft Works for DOS to accept a new printer driver. I had the driver disk (in UK English) and I had Works and DOS (in LatAm Spanish.)

(My Spanish boss gave me the job, porque yo hablo un poquito de Español.)

MS Works wouldn't register the driver, whether installed, or manually decompressed and copied.

Eventually I worked it out. English-language Works called printer drivers `.PRD`, for "Printer Description" or something like that. Spanish-language Works called them `.DIM` for "Descripción de Impresora" or words to that effect.

Rename `OKIDAT24.PRD` to `OKIDAT24.DIM` and Spanish Works immediately saw it and the printer could be selected in Preferences and it worked perfectly.

Yes, filenames and even file extensions get translated sometimes.

Note for those too young to have used MS/PC/DR DOS: it did not have printer driver support, at all. It sent plain text to the PRN: or LPT1: port device, and nothing but plain text.

(OK, or LPT2: or LPT3: -- but I don't think I ever saw a machine with multiple selectable printers. It was cheaper and easier to buy a physical printer switch box and turn the dial than fit an extra ISA card with a Centronics port, and then configure it to have its own IRQ line.)

Apps did that for themselves. So, each DOS app had to have its own dedicated printer drivers.

[PaulRobinson]

Stood out to me too, as was sure that was not true. I'm a native Brit, I'm on the wrong side of mid-40s, often read historical literature that uses pre-decimal currency (and notation), and have never seen an interpunct used at all, or heard it referenced in terms of British currency until today.

Unfortunately, I'm the sort of pedant who on seeing somebody state an incorrect fact with such certainty, I doubt the veracity of the rest of what they have to say. I wonder where the author got this idea from?

[dspillett]

Born in the late 70s, so also mid-40s, I worked retail in the 90s and older pricing guns often used a raised · rather than one aligned with the baseline, so I didn't doubt that it might have been common, or even official, in the past, when I read it. Such guns would sometimes have “old style” alignment with the baseline for the numbers¹ too.

The “still in use today” part is quite definitely wrong though.

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numeral_variations#Old-...

[adamomada]

Even in North America, old school cash registers printed their receipts with the decimal as the dot in that purple ditto ribbon colour. I’m also remembering ticker tape calculators were the same as well.

[llimos]

And the government website doesn't use it [1].

So hard to see in what sense it's "official".

[1] https://www.gov.uk/passport-fees

[Sharlin]

To be fair, traditionally 95% of digital content has zero amount of typographical finesse and simply uses whatever is available in the local standard keyboard layout. Even the use of em and n dashes is a big deal.

[dcminter]

The decimal currency in the UK is essentially the same age as me - and I have never heard this claim that an interpunct is somehow more official. So the claim stood out to me as being outlandish; not impossible, just super unlikely.

To show I have no ill will toward outlandish Britishisms, this one applied in Parliament until relatively recently...

"To increase their appearance during debates and to be seen more easily, a Member wishing to raise a point of order during a division was, until 1998, required to speak with his hat on. Collapsible top hats were kept for the purpose."

https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-inf...

[Sharlin]

Yeah, I don't doubt you, just meant that web copy is usually so typographically impoverished compared to print that it's not in itself much of evidence.

[ascorbic]

True, but not in the case of gov.uk typography, which has had a huge amount of thought put into it. e.g. https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2022/12/12/making-the-gov-uk... https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...