Extremeophile wrote:Maybe there's a shortcut I'm not aware of ... are you saying that when you leave a space between numbers that all the various software programs recognize this as feet and inches?etc.
While I still handle lumber in feet-inches and fractions, I survey in meters unless feet are required.
Nonetheless, Auriga supports feet-inches. They get displayed with ' and " but for convenience, they can be entered with just a separating space. Internally, they get converted to decimal feet with 2 decimals. This is the only time Auriga performs a conversion. Other than that, numeric data is kept unit-less and the session (aka survey in Compass) determines the unit. Raw data remains as input, but conversions may be necessary during computations when various units are mixed within a given cave.
Extremeophile wrote:Another advantage of an engineering scale is not needing to qualify the reading you're giving with a unit, e.g. "twenty four point five" rather than "twenty four feet, six inches".
But you could say "twenty four feet, six" and that would be as clear. Or "twenty four space, six" since this is the way it would get input. My preference would go to "two four space six".