Foot/inch units and fractional/architectural formats

Hi, I’m Peter, working at Shapr3D. We need some help from people using imperial (foot and inch) units along with fractional/architectural formats to improve the current experience. Any feedback, especially from architects, would be welcome! (As we’re not used to imperial units here in Europe.)

Currently Shapr3D provides you 3 format options (decimal/fractional/architectural) in both inch and foot units modes. This makes 6 combinations possible, but it might be the case that not all these 6 modes makes sense.

My questions:

  1. Do you use Architectural format in Inch units mode, or only in Foot units mode? If so, why?
    (My assumption is that Architectural mode only really make sense in Foot units mode, as you would want to display feet + inches too, e.g. 1’ - 3 1/2" )

  2. Do you use Fractional format in Foot units mode? e.g. 3 1/2’ (feet)
    (My assumption is that this does not really make sense at all)

So I’m thinking about reducing the options to the meaningful ones only:

  • In Inch units mode: Decimal format (15.5") or Fractional format (15 1/2")
  • In Foot units mode: Decimal format (15.5’) or Architectural format (1’ - 3 1/2")

What do you think?

Sidenote:

There are 3 other known issues with imperial units too - independently from my above question:

  1. Currently, when you change to Feet units mode, dimensions are not displayed in feet… we’ll fix that!
  2. Currently, you cannot enter values numerically in feet, only in inches… we’ll fix that!
  3. Currently, when using Decimal Format in Foots or Inch units modes, the grid has imperial unit subdivisions (1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc) instead of decimals (0.1, 0.12, 0.123 etc) … we’ll fix that!

Hi Peter I’m from the UK,

I am not an architect nor an expert user but I do use imperial for architectural modelling but metric for smaller drawings and I would like to answer question 2. I do use fractional format in the way you highlight and strongly prefer it over decimal imperial measurement as it is far more accurate to measure in divisions of scale rather than do inaccurate conversions. Hope that gives you a little feedback.

Regards
Tom C

Hi Tom, thanks for the feedback!