Re: Metric

I used to design business forms. Most typewriters (remember those) and computer printers were based on the inch systems but used many strange scales. I ended up having to work with line spacing of 1/8", 1/4", 1/3" and

1/2", character spacing varied from 1/12", 1/10", 1/8", 1/6" and up to 5/32". The biggest problem is that the typesetting equipment all ran on another scale traditionally used by typesetters and printers, picas and points. While conversion is not precise, a pica is very close to 1/6" and there are 12 points to a pica which works out to about 72 points to the inch.

When you work in all these scales for many years it becomes natural to you and you can convert back and forth in your head easily. I still have stainless steel rulers in all these spacings and scales, and often use them when one of them will work better for me. When it works correctly I will even use metric.

One of the reasons that the old Imperial system is dying is that different countries used different standards. I learned many years ago that Imperial measurements are useless in precision work because England, Canada, Australia and the US all had different lengths of inches. Granted this was at the 5th or 6th decimal but it was unuseable. Another example is the gallon. Do you prefer it to liters? But which gallon? In the printing business we had to mix photo chemicals for our litho camera film. You would have to check where the Kodak chemicals were made because if they said add

30 ounces of concentrate to a gallon of water, you needed to know which ounces and which gallon. A US Gallon contains 128 ounces which is 4 quarts of 32 ounces each, a Canadian Gallon contains 160 ounces which is 4 quarts of 40 ounces each. Even the ounces were slightly different. In this regard metric is much easier.