Allow up to 3-character custom currency symbols

[vanillajonathan]

In USA you have $100, in Britain you have £100, but in Sweden you have 100 SEK, in Norway you have 100 NOK, in Denmark you have 100 DKK.

Some currencies have a symbol such as $ or £ or € but some currencies does not have any symbol.

[nlogozzo]

The custom currency symbol is allowed to have up to two characters or one emoji. In the meantime, you could use symbols like SE and NO for SEK and NOK respectively.

@fsobolev Should we extend the max character limit to 3 for custom currency symbol?

[vanillajonathan]

Also note that the national convention in some countries is to have the currency suffixed, not prefixed.

[nlogozzo]

The part of having currency suffixed or prefixed comes from your user locale.

For example, let's say you're in en_US. Currency symbols are displayed on the left: $123.45. Therefore, if you use a custom currency, let's say SE for the symbol. It will be displayed as SE123.45 since that's the user's locale.

Same if you are in Sweden and change your symbol to $. The amount will be displayed as 123,45 $ because those are the settings of the system locale.

Remember, custom currency symbol/code have no regional information or anything like that. It's merely just changing the symbol and code used by Denaro. All formatting comes from your locale setting instead.

[vanillajonathan]

Maybe it uses LANG only? I don't think it uses LC_MONETARY, LC_TIME, or LC_NUMERIC.

I have the language set to English (because I want the user interface in English), but I have another locale set for LC_ADDRESS, LC_NAME, LC_MONETARY, LC_PAPER, LC_IDENTIFICATION, LC_TELEPHONE, LC_MEASUREMENT, and LC_TIME.

[nlogozzo]

Yes, C# (as well as C++ when we had Money) uses LANG when generating CultureInfo. Hence the example scenario provided above.

[nlogozzo]

Use #233 to track the use of LC_MONETARY for number formats.

[fsobolev]

in Sweden you have 100 SEK, in Norway you have 100 NOK, in Denmark you have 100 DKK.

SEK, NOK and DKK are codes. According to wikipedia, DKK's symbol is kr. and for NOK abd SEK it's kr (without dot).

@fsobolev Should we extend the max character limit to 3 for custom currency symbol?

Yes. Indeed there are 3-character symbols.

[vanillajonathan]

SEK, NOK and DKK are codes. According to wikipedia, DKK's symbol is kr. and for NOK abd SEK it's kr (without dot).

I think the account setup dialog is confusing. For me it is not obvious what to write in the Currency Symbol and the Currency Code inputs.

[fsobolev]

I think the account setup dialog is confusing. For me it is not obvious what to write in the Currency Symbol and the Currency Code inputs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

[vanillajonathan]

ISO 4217 is anything but obvious, you can't expect end-users to know about such standards.

The input could provide auto-completions to assist the user. The input could also have a placeholder or a textual description that explains the expected value.

[fsobolev]

ISO 4217 is anything but obvious, you can't expect end-users to know about such standards.

We can't expect a user to know that currency codes are defined by ISO 4217 standard, but we can expect a user to understand a difference between currency code and currency symbol, because it's just a common properties of money, not something specific for Denaro. If somebody don't know how money works, it's not a Denaro bug.

[vanillajonathan]

Why can't it just provide a dropdown with a flag for each currency?

Example: 🇩🇰️ Danish krone 🇳🇴️ Norwegian krone 🇵🇱️ Polish złoty 🇸🇪️ Swedish krona 🇺🇦️ Ukrainian hryvnia

Then it would be much easier for the end-user.

[nlogozzo]

Why can't it just provide a dropdown with a flag for each currency?

Example: 🇩🇰️ Danish krone 🇳🇴️ Norwegian krone 🇵🇱️ Polish złoty 🇸🇪️ Swedish krona 🇺🇦️ Ukrainian hryvnia

Then it would be much easier for the end-user.

Currency symbol != Country Flag

Currency symbol is the symbol of the currency...$, €, etc... I don't understand what you are trying to do here. If you'd like you can add an emoji in the Account Name field to show up throughout the application.

[nlogozzo]

There are also 100++ different currencies that would make it impossible and extremely slow to list all of them for user selection. If a user prefers to use a currency different then their reported system currency they can simply replace the symbol with what they would like. Or change their LC_MONETARY, which will be supported with #233 .

[vanillajonathan]

100+ currencies doesn't sound so much, it doesn't should like it should be slow, I think it would render fast, plus you could use a dropdown with a built-in filter function or have a text input with autocompletion instead of a dropdown.

[fsobolev]

100+ currencies doesn't sound so much, it doesn't should like it should be slow, I think it would render fast, plus you could use a dropdown with a built-in filter function or have a text input with autocompletion instead of a dropdown.

If a user wants to use custom currency, they already know what currency it is, so dropdown with a full list of available currencies is useless. If a user doesn't understand difference between currency symbol and code, I'm sure a person who managed to install Denaro knows how to use google to get information about common terms - not Denaro-specific, not technical, not some terms that only economists use - common terms. But even without this knowledge, currency symbol can be anything, and it's not necessary to set custom currency code, it is optional, and it's made like this on purpose - a user might want to count dabloons, primogems from Genshin Impact, gold from World of Warcraft, or even candy wrappers - none of this are real-world currencies (well, candy wrappers are real, but not a currency) with established symbols and codes, and a user can use anything they want as symbol and as code - including not providing code at all if they decide they don't need it. Any hints or suggestions in UI will be insufficient or even more confusing, because a user might think the app expects something special, but no, any characters can be used. So it's better to not provide suggestions at all.

[vanillajonathan]

But this software will be used even by people who are not economists, so it would be good if the software was as simple as possible so that non-economists didn't have to resort to Google.

So if someone wants to use Denaro for World of Warcraft gold or something with no defined currency symbol, then user is still required to set a Currency Symbol, maybe it should be optional too.