There's another alternative: Fixing your bug.

This is exactly what I want to do. It's not clear to me yet how to do that but I have some new ideas from this discussion. For example I will play with the idea of controlling the size of the the floats as mentioned by ikegami above. I have already tried explicit rounding rather than using sprintf but I will also try variations of that.

I should have said above that I may have to remove support for uselongdouble Perls until I can fix this bug. This bug has already been open three days.