Context-dependent rendering of numbers as words

[CharlesDM]

I'm a technical writer and our organization uses variables for a lot of data (e.g., product X has 4 USB ports and product Y has 3 USB ports). This is great for when when we want to present data in tables; however, it's a problem when we want to talk about a product in text because pulling these numbers from the variable results in the number being expressed numerically. Grammatically, these numbers should be rendered as words when appearing in text. It would be good to have a feature whereby a numerical variable could be stored in both numerical and text forms, and could be contextually recalled.

[Radu]

Hi,

The use case in itself is interesting, maybe you could also register and ask other writers on the DITA Users List if they had found a solution for it:
https://dita-users.groups.io/g/main

We do not have such a feature.
For now you would probably need to create two reusable variables, one with the figures and one with the word equivalents.
Possibly one could try to avoid this by having some kind of publishing customization which converts figures to words at publishing time but this of course would be problematic to implement both for English once you start having larger numbers and it would need to be implemented for other languages as well if the content is translated to multiple languages.

Regards,
Radu