On Monday 01 May 2006 7:04 pm, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
Granted, using fractions of inches in carpentry is a PITA, but imagine how much worse when you're mixing basic units at the same time! Dual labeling doesn't give all the advantages of the metric system, it just glosses over the problem and makes politicians happy.
Yes, the problems of measurement are solvable with a little inconvenience but the problems of fitting Male Part A to Female Part B are not when A and B are measured in different systems. (Some old cars used Whitworth sizes, which are compatible neither with inches nor centimeters.) And getting back to the original issue of A4 paper versus letter-size paper, page images designed for one cannot easily be transformed into page images for the other unless you're willing either to put up with weird margins and truncations or some kind of geometric scaling that makes the fonts look funny. Paul