Units in inches-fractions?

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teletypeguy
Posts: 96
Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2023 8:41 pm

Units in inches-fractions?

Post by teletypeguy »

My first learning project with freecad is a cabinet I need to make. Freecad is really overkill for this; I did a whole kitchen of cabinets before with 2d pencil sketches on graph paper, but this is a great first project to get some time using FC (and learning parametrics for definitions and some intermediate calculations, but that is a topic for another day).

My current question is about Units. For almost everything mechanical I love mm, but for woodworking (here in the US), fractional inches are impossible to avoid -- all my machines have inch scales and I layout with my favorite inch lefty/righty tape measure.

I have two questions actually: first, is there a way to set preferred units in the document and not as a current global? I want inches for this project but mm for others and as far as I can tell it is not a document setting.

Second, when I go to Edit/Preferences/Units, I can select various unit settings. I want to use TechDraw pages to generate my desired cut drawings. For example, suppose I expect to see 20+1/2" or 5+5/16" for a couple of dimensions -- the most-likely inch-related units are (setting 4-decimal-places to resolve to 1/16"):

- US-Customary, which displays inches as decimal: 20.5" or 5.31" (telling it 4-places it does not show 5.3125" and is not what I want anyway)
(Imperial-Decimal seems the same)

- Imperial-Civil-Engr which displays feet as decimal: 1.7083 ft or 0.4427 ft -- sheesh, no

- Building-US which displays feet-inches-fractions: 1' 8+1/2" or 5+5/16" -- this is fine under 12", then yuk, but closer to what I want

>>>>>> What I want is inches-plus-fractions: 20+1/2" or 5+5/16" -- is there a way to get this?

cab-1.png
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cab-2.png
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cab-3.png
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Workshop_Notes
Posts: 590
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2021 8:35 am

Re: Units in inches-fractions?

Post by Workshop_Notes »

I think what you are asking overlaps partially or completely with this:

viewtopic.php?p=674705

See also:

https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/9263

where it references:

viewtopic.php?t=57274
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teletypeguy
Posts: 96
Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2023 8:41 pm

Re: Units in inches-fractions?

Post by teletypeguy »

I see -- a rather small number of users wanting this. Guess I will just have to scribble on my techdraw outputs.

On the related question: can units be set in a project file or is it just a global pref?

thx
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wandererfan
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Re: Units in inches-fractions?

Post by wandererfan »

teletypeguy wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:49 pm - US-Customary, which displays inches as decimal: 20.5" or 5.31" (telling it 4-places it does not show 5.3125" and is not what I want anyway)
(Imperial-Decimal seems the same)
If you are talking about Dimensions in TechDraw, you need to set your format spec to the number of decimals you want to see.
Dim4Decimals.png
Dim4Decimals.png (49.26 KiB) Viewed 469 times
Somebody is working on both file level units and an inch+fraction unit schema, but I don't think it will make it into the v0.21 release.
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