The same distance, written the way a panel is read rather than logged.
formatDistance carries three decimals at every magnitude, which is right
for a log line and wrong on screen: a camera 20,780 km out reads
"20779.659 km", where the last four digits move every frame and none of them
is a fact anyone is using. The rule is decimals by magnitude within the unit
band — none at 100 and above, one above 10, two below — so what prints is
never finer than about a thousandth of the reading itself, which is the
resolution at which a digit stops moving every frame. It is not a
significant-figure rule and does not read as one at the top of a band:
123,456,789 m is 123,457 km, six figures, because the band runs to
an AU and cutting it to three would round a camera position to the nearest
thousand kilometers.
The thousands separator is what makes five digits scannable at a glance — the difference between "20780" and "20,780" is the difference between counting and reading.
Grouped by hand rather than through toLocaleString, for the reason
dossier.ts states: the browser's locale would choose the decimal separator,
so the same body would render "6.371,0 km" on one machine and "6,371.0 km" on
another. Every readout in this interface is an instrument reading, and
instruments do not translate.
- mnumber
- Undocumented