jorts

This module abbreviates numbers for comparison using US English short-scale.

For example:

> jorts.many([1231, 8345, 0, 19353])
< ["1K", "8K", "0", "19K"]

This abbreviation style puts focus on differences magnitude of the numbers, rather than possibly arbitrary precision.

When to scale, and to what precision, is handled automatically. Use jorts.many on the entire set of values you'll display for best results, rather than making repeat calls to jorts.one. The algorithm intentionally hides noisy precision across the set: 117 becomes "0K" in the presence of values in the thousands (117 isn't 0, but how not-zero it is doesn't matter much when considering values much larger than 117), while 0 is always "0" (truly nothing, as short as it gets), and 117 on its own is "117" (there's time and space to ponder a 117 by itself exactly as it is.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales for more about short scales.

jorts for charting

jorts should be used very carefully, if at all, in graphing/charting, because it doesn't return intermediate (rounded) values it abbreviates.

In charting you should generally choose axis minimum, maximum, and axis marker values because they bound & explain the other data and then because they have nice abbreviations. Say you're plotting [545, 627, 1993, 4871]. You might choose axis marker values [0, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000]. You'd plot 545 close to midway between 0 and 1000, 627 a bit above 545, 1993 near 2000, and 4871 near 5000. You might label the 0 plot "0", the 1000 "1K", the 2000 "2K", and you might then think "ah, I'll use jorts for that part", but then you're making an assumption about how it works internally. You already did the hard work of choosing values that abbreivate nicely, and you may as well finish it without jorts.

Notes

• Only US English is supported. We could add additional locales over time but I'm not familiar enough with non-US English short scaling expectations to do it. Please offer to help if you'd like to research and implement a locale.
• In US English "M" is used instead of "MM" for 10^6. It's understood "MM" is sometimes used in US financial reporting, but the focus of this library is abbreviation and "M" is shorter. "B" is used for 10^9.
• The largest scale used is 10^12. For US English this seemed sufficient. If you're scaling larger numbers scientific notation may be more appropriate than short scaling.