Personalisation of formats

Documentation Help and Information
#1

Hello,
I’m new to Ubuntu and the communities.
This is maybe not the right place for this topic, if so please feel free to delete the topic.

After installing Ubuntu I tried to set the language, date, time and number formats. However, I was surprised to find that there is apparently no interface for doing this. There is a choice of country, which then sets the language and all the other formats as a package.
I have no “country”. For my daily use, I need to set the formats independently of any “country” pack or “locale”.
I and many of my colleagues are internationals. We have moved from the place where we were born, many of us live very close to a national border, living on one side and working on the other. In my particular case I am originally a Dutch language Belgian, but for the last 45 years I have been in France, close to Geneva in Switzerland, and I worked at CERN where I used almost exclusively English.
I can’t use any of the English locales nor the French or Swiss.
My settings on other systems are:
language=English
currency=euro — €
units=metric
date=YYYY-MM-DD — 2020-12-13
long date= day, d month year — Sunday, 13 December 2020
first day of the week=Monday
time=HH:MM:SS — 20:28:48
thousands (group) separator="’" (single quote)
decimal point="." — 12’345’678.99

How do I do that, so that all applications (e.g. LibreOffice) use it?
It is easy in Windows and MacOS.

Also, I need to switch off spelling checking system-wide, because I mix at least three languages plus a lot of acronym — and I know how to spell.

So, I would like to know how I can easily do all that without typing terminal line commands. If it’s not possible, then it is a suggestion for future implementation.

Best regards,

1 Like
#2

Hi Robert,

While I pointed at this site when we talked at Ask Ubuntu, it was because you raised a design matter. But now I see that you worded your topic as a request for help at first hand (“how do I”), and this site is not a proper place to ask for support. (Ask Ubuntu is.) So I’d like to ask you to edit your post so it gets more clearly worded as a proposal for certain changes rather than requests for help.

At the same time I have a feeling that you haven’t yet explored the existing possibilities very deeply. How to fix LibreOffice to your liking and how to disable spell checking sounds to me as two possible Ask Ubuntu questions. It’s probably easier to formulate an idea for a changed design when you have found out about the existing possibilities and limitations.

I also think that this topic got sorted in the wrong category. It’s not the documentation you question, as far as I understand, but the design of certain aspects of the desktop settings. Hence I suggest that you change the category of this topic to “Desktop”.