Thank you *very* much Peter and Frank. I was not seeing the way out.
Frank:
American users know what a 12 or a 9 point is; the only practical result of translating the interface to 4 mm vs 3 mm would be an obscene waste of time and headaches for the user; while translating the interface for the font size to American draftman's inches would be headaches for me (since a dimension parameter will show a 1/8" font as an ugly 0'-1/8", the interface would need to use real numbers or text VALUES to represent inches). Points are goood. (I don't know where it is that one sets it, but my Text tool is dimensioned in points.)
Dan:
- The font 'point' is 1/72 of an inch.
- An inch is 25.4 mm.
- GDL sets font size in paper size, that is regardless of the drawing plan scale, so that a 3 mm text will print as 3 mm text no matter what scale you are using for your drawing. So that if you want to know the equivalent 'model dimension' of your text, you need to multiply that by GLOB_SCALE (which is the model/drawing ratio; you can check in the Scale Settings in the ArchiCAD window, or if you are at say 1/8"=1' it is 8 parts in an inch *12 inches in a foot=96).
- ArchiCAD may display ft-in (even in the parameters in the Object settings), but GDL thinks m. It helps, and also helps in sowing confusion, that you can actually script ft-in values --but if you ask a script to PRINT its thoughts about a dimension parameter, you'll get meters/metres no matter what your dimension preferences are. Ft-in are an interface display thing: so once you GDL-calculated a dimension in meters, you don't want to try to convert that to ft-in by doing math in GDL unless you want to mess up everything beyond repair.
Soooo, if you are needing the model ft-in height of a font size expressed in points, you need to do
(fontSize/72*1")*GLOB_SCALE, which is easy to read in ft-in, or
(fontSize/72*0.0254)*GLOB_SCALE, which is what a metric guy would do, or
(fontSize/72*25.4)*GLOB_SCALE/1000, which is my temporarily preferred hybrid only because I am trying to learn to think ft-in and make it readable for a ft-in guy, but deep inside I am still metric (err, I am thinking that actually the second method may be the more readable for a ft-in guy, apart from making more arithmetical sense).
I have been metric all my life, and started working in ft-in about two years ago. Operations in ft-in are a mess by themselves, but when you add to that mm instead of m and 'paper scale' as opposed to model dimensions, oh boy. There are very good reasons for each of those complications of course. But it gets hard when you are trying to learn a new function from the Hungarian English manual, and can't keep track of what 'height' they are talking about at each point (text height or box height, paper scale or real dimensions, text mm or GDL m, which of the damned eight height values are we talking now? Once you've learned the functions you don't have that problem any more --you only have it when you are learning, which is when you happen to need to use the manual).
