Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates

Format for display

Restating things I mentioned on the Manual of Style talk page, and more

spacing issues

One of your stated goals is more uniformity in the representation—but we need to decide what that uniform representation should be. For example, should there be any spaces at all within the numbers? Both ways are used. NIST, in explaining that this is an exception to the rule that there is a space between a number and its symbol, closes up all the spaces its example "α = 32°22′8″" http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec07.html

• This rule has the advantage of being nonbreaking on the primes—though as I have seen with temperatures, the degree sign is not nonbreaking. If you do use spaces, it should be nonbreaking spaces between the degrees and minutes and between minutes and seconds.

I prefer the closed-up representation, with spaces between the number and the directional indicators and between latitude and longitude:

• 12°02′36″ S 177°01′42″ W

Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I begun using no spaces, but found that at least on my screen the symbol and the next digit came so close that they were touching. Not pretty. I switched to   which looks better on my screen, FWIW. The ideal thing would be a non-breaking half-space. Is there such an animal? The break point is between the latitude and the longitude, which I think is as it should be. -- Egil 12:14, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

padding with zeros

You, in your examples, padded zeros in your entry for the minutes and seconds. But that is not a feature of the template, at least not yet. You also did not pad a second zero in the longitude degrees. Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As it is now, padding of zeros are accepted (there was a bug which is now gone), and the padding will appear just as in the template arguments. With todays template mechanism, I think there is no other way. -- Egil 12:16, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Error checking on entry

Is there any way the template can do some error checking of range of numbers, as well as convert them from text to numbers to aid in making consistent padding of the numbers?

I'd like to see something like the "Did not parse" errors in TEX entry. Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

No error checking yet, this should of course be implemented at some stage. -- Egil 12:21, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Error in off-Wikipedia map sources page

You have your minutes and seconds symbols reversed. Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The source text for this is in fact on Wikipedia, so anyone can edit on Wikipedia:Map sources. What is off Wikipedia is the script. -- Egil 12:20, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)