US Survey Feet vs. International Feet Warning prompt

[Mike.M.Carlson]

Hi everyone-

With the release of AutoCAD 2017 we have the US Survey Foot UNIT, which I like.  However, there are a lot of legacy drawings out there in the Engineering \ Surveying community that are set to FEET (or International Feet).  I realize the 1 International Foot to 0.999998 US Survey Feet conversion factor is small, but in US State Plane Coordinate Systems, this conversion can be significant if accidentally applied without the USER's knowledge. (~10-15 feet).

So my Idea:

Help the USER (who has their drawing set to US Survey Feet) know via a Warning Dialog or Prompt that the source file they're about to insert is set to International Feet...AND Vice Versa.  This would apply to the following off the top of my head:

blocks,

XREF DWGs,

Data Shortcuts

Georeferenced images,

GIS Data,

LandXML, etc.

RECAP .rcs files

Please feel free to add to the list 🙂  

Thanks for your time.

[jefflambert9091]

In 2017 and up "FEET" should be renamed to "International FEET" to avoid any confusion.  

[Mike.M.Carlson]

Yes great idea @jefflambert9091!  Thanks!

[BlackBox_]

1+

This thread may not currently account for all items in the OP's apt list of inclusions, but may still be of use: http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?169059-Lisp-to-warn-about-international-Feet

Cheers

[Anonymous]

The U.S. Survey Foot is being eliminated anyway so not sure why someone at Autodesk thought that this setting/override would help.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/15/us-ends-survey-foot-use-requires-international-foo/ 

[Mike.M.Carlson]

Good point, but the US Foot unit isn't going away anytime soon.  NGS is in preliminary stages of how to phase it out, so in the meantime, we need to be careful attaching/inserting legacy (<v17) formatted dwgs with "FEET" specified and having USFEET as the unit in the current drawing to avoid subtle scale issues.

[jefflambert9091]

Even when it goes away, legacy projects don't.  Below is a link from the federal register:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/17/2019-22414/deprecation-of-the-united-states-us-...