Working Units to be part of Work Environment?

[Laszlo Nagy]

I am curious about how people think about this:
There is the Working Units Dialog which in AC13 is now a separate Dialog, not part of the Project Preferences Dialog.
We had this issue in our office that one person likes to enter values and coordinates in meters, but the other one likes to use centimeter because then she does not have to enter decimals.
So to me this looks like a setting dependent of User Preferences.
In which case it may be better located in the Work Environment Dialog.
What do you guys think?

[David Maudlin]

I think this would be helpful. When doing architectural work, I am using Feet & Decimal Inches (Dimensions are Feet & Fractional Inches) and Decimal Degree Angles, when entering survey information these are set to Decimal Feet and Surveyor's Units, so switching between them entails opening the Working Units dialog box and changing the settings. It might make more sense to move these to the Dimensions setting, so they could be changed via the View Map (depending on the view being used), rather than the Work Environment, which I don't normally alter after it has been properly set up.

David

[SeaGeoff]

I agree with David that this setting does not belong in WE since some users (myself included) like to switch it frequently. Although this could work if the units setting was it’s own WE subset with an available menu item, like palette profiles are now.

Putting it with dimensions is an interesting idea, but it won’t work since the whole reason for making this separate is so each TW2 user can have different settings that are not saved with the project. Which begs the question...

Laszlo, what prevents each of your colleagues from setting it up the way they like it now?

I have a keyboard shortcut set for units, which works well save a few minor quibbles. First, the decimal setting is not remembered, so if I switch from fraction to decimals I have to reset the decimals each time. Second, I would like to see text get it’s own settings. ArchiCAD doesn’t handle points properly, and I would prefer to use mm anyway. Having points hardwired to imperial units is unnecessarily restrictive.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Geoff wrote:
Laszlo, what prevents each of your colleagues from

Nothing prevents them, just one of them was complaining about this.
But it is interesting to hear for me that you are changing this. I mean, I never change it after it is set to my liking: I always display all in meters to 4 decimals (one/tenth of a millimeter accuracy) so I can see I am creating elements for the highest possible accuracy. After that I never change it. This is why I thought this would be good in the WE. But apparently others do.

[Anonymous]

I switch units often enough to care, but it seems that it would be OK in the WE if it were easier to switch Work Environments.

I don't understand why we have to open the dialog, double click the desired Work Environment (or select and click "apply") and then confirm that we do actually want to do it. It's not like we are making some drastic change that is difficult to undo.

It seems to me a pop-up in the quick options would do the trick.

[Erika Epstein]

I think moving it to the WE would be a mistake. It is fast and easy for those who don't want to be working in the dimension profile saved with a view to quickly switch it using Quick Options.


Like David I often work in feet with decimal inches. But that is NOT correct for most views and there for drawings. Woud we then have to be setting Exceptions' to make views read correctly?

[David Maudlin]

So the solution may be to leave the settings where they are, but add named sets (like Dimensions) that can be accessed somewhere (along the bottom of the current window next to the scale pop up?) [even a drop down list that can be added to my custom toolbar would be fine] so the settings can be easily changed.

David

[Laszlo Nagy]

I don't know if my questions was misunderstood but I am talking about the Working Unit page only: that page that controls the decimals and accuracy displayed in the Tracker, Dialogs and Coordinate Box.

[Erika Epstein]

Laszlo,
Good of you to clarify. Now, why don't you tell us why You would like to see this?

[Laszlo Nagy]

It is there in my first post.
One colleague of mine likes to see her numbers in centimeters so she doesn't have to enter commas before entering the decimals. So she enters 175.
The other colleague likes to see his numbers in meters. He enters 1.75.
So if one works on the same file after the other, they have to go to the Working Units Dialog and modify it.
So I think this may be a User specific preference.

So I am strictly speaking of the Working Units page alone as possibly a part of WE.