Babel and the decimal separator

Question

I'm using Babel for writing a document in spanish. However, it uses a comma instead of a period as a decimal marker (i.e. 3,14 instead of 3.14).

Is there any way to reverse the behaviour? I prefer the period, as it's done in english.

Also, I'd prefer it if it's something that can just be added to the preamble, instead of having to do it each time I want to write a number with a decimal part (like putting the period between brackets, for instance).

Answer 1

By dafault, spanish changes to a comma as decimal separator; to change to a dot, you can use \decimalpoint:

\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\decimalpoint

This gives the possibility to revert at any moment to a comma, using \decimalcomma or even to select a different symbol with \spanishdecimal{<symbol>}

The package option es-nodecimaldot disbales completely this decimal separator mechanism and uses a dot,leaving without effect \spanishdecimal{<symbol>}, and \decimalcomma:

\usepackage[spanish,es-nodecimaldot]{babel}

Answer 2

The Spanish module does tricks to accommodate for traditional Spanish typesetting rules. One is to transform periods followed by digits into a comma in math mode. You can disable this behavior with

\usepackage[spanish,es-nodecimaldot]{babel}

There are many other options, you can find them by

texdoc spanish

or going to http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/spanish/spanish.pdf