Product Dimension Labels for Export: Units and Decimals

Product dimension labels for export break in three places, and none of them is your drawing skill: the unit symbol, the decimal separator, and the language. A buyer in Munich reads 1.500 mm as fifteen hundred millimetres. A buyer in Chicago reads the same string as one and a half millimetres. Same digits, one mark apart, and one of them is now quoting a container for a product 1,000 times smaller.

The fix is not better English. It is deciding four things per market before the file leaves your office: the unit, the decimal character, the grouping, and the language of the field names.

Product dimension labels for export: the market table

Every row below is the same physical size — 1,200 mm — written the way that market's software expects it. The separators are not house style; they are the conventions recorded in the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR).

Two rows cause most of the damage. Germany and Indonesia group thousands with a dot, so a number copied from an English file is off by a factor of 1,000. And Arabic is not one convention: CLDR records ٫ (U+066B) as the decimal separator for ar-EG and ar-SA, while ar-AE defaults to Western digits with a point.

The unit symbol is not a word

A unit symbol is fixed notation, not an abbreviation of an English word. Product dimension labels for export live or die on three rules, identical in every SI market:

• A space between number and symbol. 1200 mm, not 1200mm.
• Symbols are case-sensitive. mm is millimetres; MM is not a unit; m is metres. The same trap turns kg into something that does not exist and mL into megalitres.
• No plural, no full stop. Ten millimetres is 10 mm, never 10 mms.

NIST Special Publication 811 states the space rule in section 7.2, with exceptions only for angle degrees, minutes and seconds. Commercially, 1200mm is the first thing a buyer's quality team marks as "supplier template not controlled" — and it invites them to re-check every other field.

One conversion worth memorising: one inch is exactly 25.4 mm, by definition since 1959 — not a rounded figure, so you can print 1200 mm (47.24 in) without a tolerance argument.

One comma can change the size by a factor of 1,000

The same 1.5-metre dimension, written four ways. Only one is wrong in isolation; the rest are wrong in the wrong market.

The plain-integer form — 1500 mm, no separator at all — is the only string that survives every reader. That is the one-line principle here: write whole millimetres with no grouping mark, and add a decimal only where a tolerance requires one. NIST SP 811 section 10.5.3 recommends a thin space rather than a comma for grouping, and notes the practice is usually not followed on engineering drawings anyway.

A decimal separator is not typography. It is the difference between 1.5 mm and 1,500 mm on a buyer's desk, and nobody discovers it until the carton is on the water.

Grouping: the French space that disappears in Excel

France groups thousands with a narrow no-break space (U+202F), so a correct French dimension reads 1 200 mm. Paste that cell into a spreadsheet and the character can normalise or vanish; the number was right, the file is now unreviewable. Keep the grouping in the PDF and avoid it entirely in the CSV or ERP file behind it — never send 1.200 into a field that expects a decimal point.

This is why "use SI style everywhere" is not a complete answer. SI permits a point or a comma as the decimal marker, and NIST warns against comma grouping because so much of the world reads a comma as the decimal. The standard gives you the rule; the market gives you the character.

The fields that never get translated

Translation is a decision per field, not per document. Codes, standards and classification numbers are identifiers; translating one breaks the reference it points to.

The multiplication sign deserves its own line. 1200 x 600 x 750 mm uses the letter x, which a parser may read as a variable. Write 1200 × 600 × 750 mm with U+00D7, or spell out W 1200 × D 600 × H 750 mm. Define the order once — the length, width, height order is already a recurring source of misread quotes.

Which language actually goes on the label

For most industrial and furniture goods sold business-to-business, label language is a commercial decision, not a legal one: write the field names in the language the person reading the sheet works in — the buyer's, not yours, and not English by default.

Three exceptions matter. Regulated consumer categories — food, chemicals, toys, cosmetics, many electrical goods — carry mandatory information in the market's official language. Canada is explicit: the US Commercial Service's guide states that labels must be bilingual, English and French, and metric-compliant. And the EU has 24 official languages, with member states setting consumer-information language rules; there is no single "EU label language".

The rule: one language per block, chosen per buyer, codes and standards untouched. If you need two, give each its own column.

Arabic labels: right-to-left without breaking the number

Arabic reads right to left, but the numbers inside it do not. A dimension string is a left-to-right run embedded in right-to-left text, so 1200 × 600 × 750 mm keeps its internal order on an Arabic page.

• Keep each dimension string as one uninterrupted run. Do not insert Arabic words between the numbers, and do not let the layout break the line mid-string.
• Decide the digit set and stay with it. ar-EG and ar-SA default to Arabic-Indic digits with ٫ as the decimal separator; ar-AE defaults to Western digits with a point. Ask which one the buyer's ERP accepts — a table that mixes ١٢٠٠ and 1200 looks like two suppliers wrote it.
• Mirror the block, not the numbers. Right-align the label column and check the result on a narrow screen; Arabic and Latin text, decimals and units in one row is exactly where a table collapses.

That is the same discipline communicating product dimensions to buyers asks for: the number has to survive the layout, the copy-paste and the reader.

A label block you can paste into any drawing

Build it once per market. Left is the field, middle is English, right is the German version — note what changed and what did not.

Two columns are identical on purpose — if a block changes the model code or the standard number, the translation has gone too far.

The block is only as good as the numbers. When those are read off a photo rather than typed from memory, measured dimension labels locked onto the product image keep drawing, listing and quotation on one source — the only version where the German and English files cannot drift apart.

Pre-send checklist

• Unit symbols are lowercase-correct (mm, kg, m²) with a space after the number
• Decimal mark and grouping match the buyer's market; no table mixes two marks
• The multiplication sign is U+00D7, or the order is spelled out as W × D × H
• Model, SKU, HS code, standard and colour code are untranslated; material and finish are translated and keep the species or grade name
• Field labels are in the buyer's language; two languages sit in separate columns
• For Arabic: digit set chosen, decimal separator correct, number runs kept left to right
• Opened in the file type the buyer receives, not only in the design file

FAQ

Should product dimensions be in inches or millimetres for international buyers?

Millimetres first, with inches in brackets for a US-facing market. Industrial and building-material buyers read millimetres everywhere, including the United States, because drawings and tooling are metric. The inch is exactly 25.4 mm, so printing both is a definition, not an approximation.

Do European buyers use a comma or a point for decimals?

Both, by country. Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Indonesia use a comma; the UK, Ireland, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines use a point. The safe string is a whole number with no decimal — 1200 mm — with a decimal only where a tolerance needs one.

What language should a product spec sheet be written in?

The buyer's language for field names and descriptions, with model codes, standards, HS codes and colour codes left as published. For most B2B goods the choice is commercial; regulated categories such as food, chemicals and toys carry mandatory language rules that override it.

How do I write dimensions for Arabic-speaking buyers?

Let the page flow right to left and keep each dimension string as a left-to-right run: 1200 × 600 × 750 mm. Ask whether the buyer's system expects Arabic-Indic (١٢٠٠) or Western digits (1200), and use the separator ٫ if the document is set in Arabic numbering. Never mix digit sets in one table.

Is "1200x600x750mm" acceptable on a spec sheet?

No. It packs three mistakes into one string: no space before the unit, the letter x instead of the multiplication sign, and no separation between numbers and unit. Write 1200 × 600 × 750 mm. A buyer's quality team reads the first line of a spec sheet as a signal of how the file was controlled.

Sources & References

• NIST Special Publication 811, Chapter 7 — rules and style conventions, including the space between value and unit symbol
• NIST Special Publication 811, Chapter 10 — decimal sign or marker (10.5.2) and grouping digits (10.5.3)
• NIST Office of Weights and Measures — SI units: length, including the exact 25.4 mm definition of the inch
• Unicode CLDR project — locale data for decimal and grouping separators by market
• unicode-org/cldr-json — per-locale number symbols (decimal, group) used to build the market table above
• European Union — official languages of the EU (24 official languages)
• US Commercial Service, Country Commercial Guide: Canada — labeling and marking requirements, bilingual English/French and metric rules
• BIPM — The International System of Units (SI Brochure), 9th edition, on the decimal marker and unit symbols

Next steps

1. Rebuild the label blocks for the two markets that generate the most quotes this quarter.
2. Write the unit symbol, decimal mark and language into a template note, so a new sales rep cannot invent a fourth convention.
3. Keep model codes, standards and repeat dimensions in one controlled sheet the catalogue, quotation and drawing all read from.