CURRENCY MINOR UNITS

178 codes in the standard: 139 currencies divide by 100, 17 do not divide at all, 7 divide by 1,000 — and 25 codes are not money you can spend

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: units · everyone · reference · study

The minor unit is a count of decimal places: 10ⁿ small units make one big one. The figure at the right of each row is n, and ° marks a code you cannot pay with.

THE FIFTH THE STANDARD CANNOT SEE

The standard can only count decimal places. CLDR keeps a second record beside it — the step that a sum paid in cash must be a multiple of — and there are 5 of them: 0.05 CAD, 0.05 CHF, 0.20 MRU, 0.50 DKK, 5 HUF.

The first ones are a coin: a one or a five in its own place. The last begins with a two, and it is the only one that does: the smallest sum payable in cash in MRU is 0.20 — a 5th of the unit, not a hundredth. ISO 4217 records that currency as plain hundredths, because it has no other way.

On the sheet

The minor unit is a count of decimal places: 10ⁿ small units make one big one. The figure at the right of each row is n, and ° marks a code you cannot pay with.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 9 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

CURRENCY MINOR UNITS

THE FIFTH THE STANDARD CANNOT SEE

On the sheet

Printing

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