Country and Language
This module of the control center allows you select customization options that depend on the region of the world that you happen to live in. There are four different pages in this module, each of which is described in detail in the following sections.
In most cases, you can simply select the country you live in, and the other options will be set in an appropriate manner.
Below the pages of this module, you can see a preview of what the settings look like. In addition to positive and negative numbers, you can see how positive and negative currency values, long and short dates, and times are displayed. When you change any of the settings, the preview shows the effects of the changes before you apply them.

Locale
On this page, there are three lists, from which you can select the country, language, and character set that you want to use.
When you click on the Country list, a menu pops up showing major groups of countries. You can select one of these regions and see a list of the countries that are available for that region.
If the language for the country you have selected is available on your system, it will be selected automatically. For instance, choosing Germany as the country will select German as the language, if it is available.
The default character set, ISO-8859-1, is for use with the Latin 1 family of languages. If you are not using English or another Western European language, you will need to select the appropriate character set for your language so that fonts are displayed properly. For example, ISO-8859-5 should be used for Cyrillic, and ISO-8859-6 for Arabic.
Note that selecting the character set is not sufficient on it's own! You will also need to have the appropriate fonts installed on your system.

Numbers
On this page, you can select options for how numbers are displayed. The defaults are selected automatically based on the country which is currently selected.
In the text box labeled Decimal symbol, you can type the character that you want to use to separate the decimal portion of numbers. You could put anything here you wanted to, but really, . and , are the two characters that make the most sense.
Similarly, you can choose the character which is used to group units of thousands in numbers. If no character, not even a space, is present, then there will be no separator for thousands.
Finally, you can choose what character should be prefixed to positive and negative numbers respectively. For example, the default for English is not to have any prefix for positive numbers, and a - for negative numbers.

Money
Unlike the display of ordinary numbers, conventions for currency values do vary from region to region. However, you will find that the defaults are probably fine.
The character or characters representing the currency symbol are based on the country that is currently selected. The decimal symbol and thousands separator work as they do for numbers. The text box labeled Fract digits allows you to specify the number of fractional digits used in displaying currency values.
For both positive and negative currency values, you can control whether the currency symbol appears before or after the numeric value, and how the sign of the value is distinguished in the display. Note that the symbols used for the sign of currency values are the same as those used for other numeric values.
If the checkbox labeled Prefix currency symbol is selected, the currency symbol appears before the numeric value. If this checkbox is cleared, then the currency symbol appears after the numeric value.
There are five choices for the way in which the sign of the currency value is handled:
The Parens around option displays the numeric value within a pair of parentheses.
The Before quantity money option displays the sign before the numeric value, but after any currency symbol that may be present.
The After quantity money option displays the sign after the numeric value, but before any currency symbol that may be present.
The Before money option displays the sign before the numeric value as well as any currency symbol that may be present.
The After money option displays the sign after the numeric value as well as any currency symbol that may be present.

Time and Dates
On this page, there are text boxes for the time, long date, and short date, in which you can type format strings to control the way in which times and dates are displayed.
Except for the special codes described below, any other characters in the format strings are displayed literally. The special codes consist of a % sign followed by a character, as shown in the list of codes below:
Time format codes:
HH - The hour according to a 24-hour clock, using two digits (00 to 23).
hH - The hour according to a 24-hour clock, using one or two digits (0 to 23).
PH (uppercase eye) - The hour according to a 12-hour clock, using two digits (01 to 12).
pH (lowercase ell) - The hour according to a 12-hour clock, using one or two digits (1 to 12).
MM - The current minute using two digits (00 to 59).
SS - The current second using two digits (00 to 59).
AMPM - Either am or pm depending on the hour. Useful with PH or pH.
Date format codes:
YYYY - The year, using 4 digits.
YY - The year, using 2 digits.
MM - The month, using 2 digits (01 to 12).
mM - The month, using 1 or 2 digits (1 to 12).
MONTH - The name of the month.
SHORTMONTH - The abbreviated name of the month.
DD - The day, using 2 digits (01 to 31).
dD - The day, using 1 or 2 digits (1 to 31).
WEEKDAY - The name of the weekday.
SHORTWEEKDAY - The abbreviated name of the weekday.
Finally, if the checkbox labeled Start Week on Monday is selected, then calendars display weeks beginning with Monday as the first day of the week, and ending with Sunday. If this checkbox is cleared, then Sunday is shown as the first day of the week, and Saturday as the last.

Section Author
This section written by:
Krishna Tateneni tateneni@pluto.njcc.com.