Comma as decimal point leading to confusion

Question

I'm writing a report in a language that uses decimal commas. In some cases that clashes with commas used for punctuation, causing hard to read text, e.g.:

for $x_i \in [-1,5, 1,5]$.

Is there a way to make this more readable?

Answer 1

If you're using the comma as decimal separator, then you should consider using the semi-colon for the interval separator, it will be more readable:

$x_i\in[-1{,}5;1{,}5]$

(Instead of typing 1{,}5, you can also use the icomma package as suggested by egreg or \num as suggested by Werner.)

Answer 2

\usepackage{icomma}
...
for $x_{i}\in[-1,5, 1,5]$.

Notice the space after the comma where you want it to act as a punctuation symbol.

Answer 3

You could try \; or \, or ~ as space (instead of " "):

$x_i \in [-1,5,\;1\,1~1,5]$

and use a semicolon for the interval separator (as already suggested by Philippe Goutet).

Answer 4

The siunitx package provides a general way of treating numbers and their decimal symbols. However, you have to explicitly encompass the numbers with \num{...}. For example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[decimalsymbol=comma]{siunitx}
\begin{document}
This is a range $x_i \in [\num{-1,5},\num{1,5}]$.
\end{document}​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

would produce