[cad-linux-dev] Re: units as an attribute or a global setting
- From: Bruno Postle <bruno@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: CAD linux development <cad-linux-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:12:01 +0100
On Thu 19-Aug-2004 at 15:08 -0500, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
>
> A drawing is almost always going to be drawn in one set of units.
> This argues strongly for a global property.
It may seem like this from your side of the atlantic, but in this
country we measure road distances in miles, beer and milk in pints,
orange juice in litres, cricket pitches in yards, bricks in
millimeters and computer monitors in inches :-(
The UK building industry generally uses millimeters for everything,
though decimeters and centimetres are more common in the rest of
Europe - and of course structural engineers use meters.
> Possibly, entities could over-ride the global units locally.
That could work. It would be neat to make this a general case - For
example an element that doesn't specify a colour attribute inherits
the default from the drawing - If the default drawing colour isn't
defined, then it is picked-up from a system fallback value.
> However, where do round-off errors really matter? If I have to
> parse it at 5mm and display it in the context of inches, the
> errors will be there somehow anyway.
..but only in the display, unmodified elements will stay unmodified
on the filesystem.
--
Bruno
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