Hi everyone,
I am wondering if there is a straightforward way to do annotation with dual-dimensions (in mm and inches) in Rhino 5. I’ve attached the image showing what I want to achieve. Hope there are some good ideas.
Thanks ! !
There isn’t a feet and decimal inches alternate unit setting in Rhino.
That’s not a commonly found unit combination particularly at the detail scale you’ve shown.
Surveyors generally use decimal feet.
The closest we have is Feet & fractional inches but you probably discovered that on yourself.
Do you speak from a fairly complete knowledge of practices around the globe, or just the US?
Since McNeel puts a lot of effort into translating their software into many languages it would seem reasonable to make a good effort to incorporate the widely varying practices for things like this.
Or do you suspect that AnnWuu714 may not be familiar with the usual practices in his/her region? It does happen.
I worked for a surveyor here in the US before I whet to work for Bob back in the AutoCAD days, long before Rhino.
I don’t know much about other drafting standards around the world.
Since Rhino’s primary use was never production drafting; our intent was for good in-house “shop” drawings, most of our work was related to surfacing.
We have added more drafting tools over the years.
From what I see here in the forum, I think that ship has sailed, at least from your user’s point of view.
yep, I have found that.
The drawing is actually from the engineer we partner with. We will report this issue to them.
Anyway, still thanks.
I see that the discussion turned to formatting the imperial units while your original question was:
Just in case you actually just want dual-dimensions like this mm [inch], you can do that by setting the Alternate text in the annotation style:
Hi Annwuu714 and All,
@AlW is correct - there is no going back. 
Rhino 6 has some improved drafting features: rich text, annotation styles, Rhino PDF writer, and baseline dimensions and the typical layouts, linetypes, print widths.
Rhino 5 is not as sophisticated as Rhino 6, but it does have some Alternate Dimension setting in the Dimension style.
Rhino 6 has alternate Length units that are part of the style or the dimension properties for overrides on specific dimensions. In Rhino 6 you have more control over the primary and alternate length unit display and formatting, than Rhino 5.
We can do a dimension with the primary unit as Decimal MM and the alternate unit as Feet-Inches Fraction.
floor plan with alternate dims.3dm (193.8 KB)
However, we can not do alternate or primary unit with Feet-Inches Decimal. This is an oversight. I am logging the bug ASAP and I will post the tracking number here soon. I guess we never thought that decimal inch used with with Feet & Inch. This is so helpful to hear that you are looking for it.
See attached sample file.
Let me know if this works for you.
Sincerely,
Mary Ann Fugier
McNeel Technical Support and Training
Seattle, WA
Thanks a lot, that’s very helpful!