[NTG-context] mkiv digits/units zero padding not working

[Benjamin Buchmuller]

Hi Wolfgang,

you are (of course) right again. I realised that I wouldn’t get the expected behaviour after checking the snippet isolated from my document’s context, where it is embedded in a \startplacetable[…]{}{}. I’m still learning to get the gist of the \doifs, the curly and square bracketed arguments and so on. Thanks for the hint! 

Seems like I’m going to make three cells and span the header column for now, though I guess it would be a nice feature to have the padding working in the other cases.

I’ll write a feature request for no 4.

Thanks!


> On 7 May 2020, at 20:00, Wolfgang Schuster <wolfgang.schuster.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Benjamin Buchmuller schrieb am 07.05.2020 um 19:41:
>> Hi Wolfang,
>> Thank you for your reply. I have indeed not explained my intended result very clearly.
>> 1.
>> Primarily, I need to get the two values aligned at the digit separator of the first and second number respectively and overall at the ± sign. I’m working in an xtable, where I have entries such as
>> \startxcell \mpm{14.0==}{_1.5==} \stopxcell
>> \startxcell \mpm{_0.034}{_0.013} \stopxcell
>> and defined
>> \def\mpm#1#2{
>> 	\ifsecondargument
>> 	\digits{#1}\,±\,\digits{#2}%
>> 	\else
>> 	\digits{#1}%
>> 	\fi
>> }
> 
> Is there something missing in here because the \ifsecondargument check here makes non sense because the second argument is mandatory and not optional.
> 
> Is this what you want?
> 
> \define[2]\mpm
>  {\digits{#1}%
>   \doifsomething{#2}{\,±\,\digits{#2}}}
> 
>> Since I was hoping that I could exploit the zeropadding of \digits to get the format right. Indeed, it would save a lot of typing, if I wouldn’t have to specify the padding manually and I vaguely recall that there is somewhere a ConTeXt solution that can make such alignments, but I simply can’t find it any more …
> 
> You can align number on the decimal point (comma) but this works only when you have only one number in a cell.
> 
> \starttext
> 
> \startxtable[aligncharacter=yes,alignmentcharacter=±]
>    \startxrow
>        \startxcell
>            \digits {14.0} ± \digits {1.5}
>        \stopxcell
>    \stopxrow
>    \startxrow
>        \startxcell
>            \digits {0.034} ± \digits {0.013}
>        \stopxcell
>    \stopxrow
> \stopxtable
> 
> \stoptext
> 
>> 2. + 3.
>> Absolutely right, this is my bad. I have badly mixed from Hans’ solution to a similar problem,
>> https://www.mail-archive.com/ntg-context@ntg.nl/msg00724.html
>> which was actually \def\zeroamount{-} and the example in the source, I didn’t read properly. Just skip that part. :)
> 
> The message is from 2003!
> 
>> 4.
>> Indeed,
>> \startxcell \mpm{14.==}{_1.5=} \stopxcell
>> \startxcell \mpm{_0.03}{_0.01} \stopxcell
>> aligns properly. But sometimes, I have the first digit specified, but not the second and unfortunately this doesn’t work
>> \startxcell \mpm{14.5=}{_1.5=} \stopxcell
>> \startxcell \mpm{_0.03}{_0.01} \stopxcell
>> because = is not immediately preceded by .
> 
> Can you write another mail with a request for this.
> 
> Wolfgang