DimArea as Sq. Ft

When using the Dim Area tool I cannot figure out how to express the area of an object as square feet.

Using the Area tool you can specify the units you need before you select your object, but not with the Dimension Area tool.

Other linear dimensions strings express themselves as feet and fractional inches, but the Dim Area string is a long decimal number of inches.

Any tips?

Right.
That tool uses a “TextField” that has no U/I control in Mac Rhino V5.
In V6, you will have better access to those tools, but there still is not value formatting tools.
The “Area” TextField calculates the area in current file units.
If you changed to Feet units, you would get the area in decimal feet.

Gotcha. So it seems that my best workaround here would be to use the Area tool in model space to figure out the square footage and then use a normal Leader in layout, manually entering the details as I wish them to appear. Is this correct?

Thanks, as always, for your lightning fast replies.

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Yes, that’s what I would do.
Someone with scripting skills might write a tool that would do the calculation automatically, but that’s not me.

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Not me either, ha ha. I’m fine with this workaround for now.

I was going to suggest that you could use a custom dimensioning style with a Length Factor to divide the inches by 144 to get square feet, but it seems that area dimensions do not comply with custom dimensioning styles at all. Prefixes, suffixes, secondary text, and Length Factor do not apply.

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Hi, Working in V6 Mac and I cannot get a sq ft area label in a normal architectural drawing with inch units. I setup a special AREA dim style with units in decimal feet and area still reads out in sq in. Anywhere I can find some directions on this?

Thanks,
Mark

The Area command can be set to report in a different unit system like you described, but the Leader command using an Area Text Field is not that sophisticated.
You need to add the text manually.

V7 has this unit conversion option built into the Text Field tool.