I have recently had experience working in millimeters while laying out
some tentative house plans. I did this using a program called "Fast
Plans", which is an Australian product, by all indications. The vendor
is Black Mountain Software.
This program is one of the few inexpensive house planning programs on
the market and it permits the use of metric or non-metric. I am not
aware of any others that do. I have tried only the metric mode and the
plans are all dimensioned and constructed in millimeters. No other
prefix options are allowed. Since the program does not do any grouping
of digits, I occasionally found myself putting in one zero too many.
That resulted in an alert telling me that I had gone too far!
I'm equally facile with all prefixed versions of the meter. I have even
used the dekameter for oceanography and the dekameter and hectometer
for meteorology. I find the decimeter useful at times, as well, in my
work in the physics teaching labs. But when the number of millimeters
in a dimension in Fast Plans gets up to the tens-of-thousands region I
find myself sorely missing the grouping of digits or the option to use
other prefixes.
By the way, I found "Fast Plans" to be useful enough that I upgraded
("unlocked" full features on) the demo version that I had downloaded.
That cost $45. Their website is at
http://www.blackmtnsoft.com/
and it provides a free downloadable demonstration program. Perhaps I
should try the non-metric mode in that program, but for the life of me
I can't think of why I should. We won't be using this program to
produce architectural drawings for US builders anyway.
Jim
On Thursday 11 May 2006 09:59, Bill Hooper wrote:
> Linda D. Bergeron wrote that she is experimenting with using
> millimetres instead of centimetres. OK, I'll try it, too. Pat
> Naughtin's arguments to do this are persuasive. I'm not ready to
> outlaw centimetres but I'll try to use only millimetres (or metres)
> exclusively for a while and see how much I can become accustomed to
> it.
>
> Here's my first effort (my signature below, one of several I use).
>
>
> Bill Hooper
> 1810 mm tall
> Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
--
James R. Frysinger
Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
Senior Member, IEEE
http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj
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