space between values and units in spinners, fdo#71688

[Caolán McNamara]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 15:01 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 01:27:37PM +0100, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> > On 01/21/2014 12:59 PM, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> > >So to resolve this we now have a function formatPercent which takes the
> > >number and the locale and runs it through icu's PercentInstance to
> > >format it according to that locale's formatting rule. Which gives e.g.
> > >"10 %" for de and "10%" for en. (http://site.icu-project.org/)
> > 
> > But at least my copy of Duden "Satz- und Korrekturanweisungen" asks for a
> > thin instead of a full space in front of percent (and per-mille) signs in
> > German.  Could we handle that, too, or is that beyond the state of the art
> > in UI typography?
> 
> Unicode has a thin space character (U+2009), so if translators used it
> it should just work. The tricky part would be ICU.

Yeah it should just work in the UI to use a narrow space. Though because
icu is currently using 0x00A0 "no-break space" presumably 0x202F "narrow
no-break space" is desirable given its similar properties. I can easily
special case replacing 0x00A0 with 0x202F from the icu result for de.

FWIW, the percent pattern formats for the various locales can be seen at
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/24/by_type/numbers.number_formatting_patterns.html
under "standard-percent"

C.