Hello,

I have just noticed this thread (I cannot really catch up reading all
the stuff here) and remembered that I have some really old files lying
somewhere on my computer.

The file dates back to the time when Brooks Moses & Hans have implemented
    \defineconversion [sl] [a] [\sloveniancharacters]
for me, so I needed to make sure that I understood the concept.

I didn't review the content, I have just added a small demo at the end.

On 4/16/07, Robin Kirkham wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> There are still a few problems with \numstr when you get beyond the
> hundreds. Perhaps this is unlikely when it is a page number, but I
> was interested in using this macro for contracts, where an amount of
> money is often written out in words.
>
> \input numstr.tex
> \starttext
> \numstr{-1}\par
> \numstr{0}\par
> \numstr{101}\par
> \numstr{1001}\par
> \numstr{1000001}\par
> \numstr{1200021}
> \stoptext
>
> This produces output:
>
> null
> null
> one hundred and one
> one thousand one
> one millionone
> one million two hundred thousand twenty-one

I didn't follow the thread, but the problems might result from the
fact that it was translated from a german counter rather than written
from scratch following some rules.

> which should be:
>
> minus one
> zero
> one hundred and one
> one thousand and one
> one million and one

My example fails on this one, but I guess that it could be fixed if
you tell me the rule to distinguish the two cases.

> one million, two hundred thousand and twenty-one
>
> In English, the tens/units (if not zero) should be preceded by "and"
> if the number exceeds 100 (so 101 is correct in the above output).
> This applies whether the tens/units is truly tens/units, or is a
> thousands or millions multiplier (120000 = "one hundred and twenty
> thousand").
>
> The use of a comma after millions and sometimes thousands is helpful
> but not essential, and it only appears in certain cases. I'll have to
> think a bit more about a rule for that!
>
> The use of a hyphen between tens and units ("twenty-one") is not
> incorrect but is nowadays probably regarded as a little old-fashioned
> (but personally, I like it).
>
> Best,
>
> Robin

I have used this page as a source:
    http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/vocabulary/numbers/cardinal

Mojca

Note 1: If the functionality/documentation can be polished out nicely,
the core or m-something might be a better place for such a module than
third-party modules. But I guess that Hans would want to split this
into *.mkii and *.mkiv anyway, so I would probably need to write the
lua implementation for it before asking for inclusion ;)

Note 2: there are some switches which would need to be implemented in
a higher level user interface. Note that the German counter might be
useless since I have never finished it.