Hi Eric, well it looks like there is not 100% agreement in different apps for whether "feet & inches" mean 1 unit = 1 inch, or whether it means 1 unit = 1 foot.

In ViaCAD / Vellum it works like MoI where there is a "Feet & inches" option in the units list and if set when you type in just plain 1 it means 1 foot.

But it looks like there are more things where it is based on inches.

I guess I may need to break this out into a separate setting more like Rhino, so that you can have the main units set to either "Feet" or "Inches", and then have an option for enabling combined feet&inches 8' 2" type display with either one.

I'm amazed that this has not come up until now in the v2 beta period. There must not be very many people using feet & inches in MoI v2 currently.

- Michael

Hi Michael ...

Yes, when I noted that Rhino was confused I was referring to it wanting to convert and correct scale.

When I was using MoI for some modeling but using Rhino for most other things I would simply let Rhino convert inserts when asked.

But this time when I was trying to use MoI for almost everything except dimensioning and notes I found that it was easiest, it seemed, to just use inches and tell Rhino to display dimensions in feet and inches. But I often wanted to enter feet and inches in MoI rather than converting to inches in my head for a lot of stuff and that's when I noticed that it is slightly awkward.

Decimal feet doesn't work for much except US surveyor's units ... all Canadian survey data in metric and it is only the building trades sticking with the old imperial units ... plywood sheets are the basic building module and are still 4'x8' ... which fixes things to imperial (with soft conversion to metric when the specs call for metric dimensioning). It is a nutty system that should have been abandoned years ago.

I'll play with this over the weekend if I have a chance so I can be clearer about how I would like it to work for me.

cheers,
eric

Hi eric, I think your best bet for the moment will be to leave the units in MoI as inches (not feet & inches) so that it will be the same as what you have in Rhino.

You will still be able to type in ' " type notation using the keyboard, but there won't be the buttons in the pop-up panel.

I will do some work for the next v2 beta to enable having the pop-up have ' and " buttons available when you have units set to inches.

If you want to type in coordinates into something other than the first field, like in Rectangle where there is a Width: and Height: both showing, push Tab until you get to the field you want and then you can type in your value.

- Michael

Thanks Michael ...

That's what I have been doing ... it works, certainly, but I do look forward to the next beta.

cheers,
eric