On 1/29/22 23:40, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> The change to lowercase is correct, but I'm not convinced by the removal
> of the space. The SI says that there should be a space, and while there
> are some cases where readability is considerably improved by removing
> the space, I think this is not one of those.
>
I just found there's a newer SI version than the one I quoted. It
doesn't change very much for what we want, but I'll quote the current
one here for the sake of completeness/correctness:
5.3 Unit names
Unit names are normally printed in upright type and they
are treated like ordinary nouns. In English, the names
of units start with a lower-case letter (even when the
symbol for the unit begins with a capital letter), except
at the beginning of a sentence or in capitali zed mater‐
ial such as a title. In keeping with this rule, the cor‐
rect spelling of the name of the unit with the symbol °C
is “degree Celsius” (the unit degree begins with a lower-
case d and the modifier Celsius begins with an upper-case
C because it is a proper name).
Although the values of quantities are normally expressed
using symbols for numbers and symbols for units, if for
some reason the unit name is more appropriate than the
unit symbol, the unit name should be spelled out in full.
When the name of a unit is combined with the name of a
multiple or sub-multiple prefix, no space or hyphen is
used between the prefix name and the unit name. The com‐
bination of prefix name and unit name is a single word
(see chapter 3).
When the name of a derived unit is formed from the names
of individual units by juxtaposition, either a space or a
hyphen is used to separate the names of the individual
units.
<https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9.pdf>
I'll add this link to the SEE ALSO section of units(7).
Cheers,
Alex
--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
