Report Form: Change ruler Inch subdivisions from 8 to 10 2

[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Hi friends,

In report form windows, I am displaying ruler in Inch. But it shows 8 sub divisions within an Inch. How do we make it 10 sub divisions? Any idea?

Rajesh

 

[Mike Lewis]

Rajesh,

Eight sub-divisions is correct. It is meant to show inches, half inches, quarter inches, and eighths of an inch. Unfortunately that's the way the system works.

If you prefer a more logical system, change the ruler from inches to "Metric/cm". Then you will see centimetres and tenths of a centimetre. This makes more sense, especially if, like most people, you measure your paper in cm or mm.

To make the change, go to Report -> Report Properties -> Ruler/Grid.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Mike,

Thanks.

Rajesh

 

[Steve Meyerson]

if, like most people, you measure your paper in cm or mm.

Hi Mike,

Are you comparing populations of one continent with another?

I say that in jest. But you may really be correct. I live in a U.S. city of over a million people (Virginia Beach) and don't even know another Foxpro person here! (Of course that may be my inability to reach out).

Your posts have been a great help.

Steve

 

[Mike Lewis]

Thanks for that, Steve.

By "most people", I suppose I meant most people in the world. But of course that would be rubbish. More accurately, it would be most people who actually measure paper, which must be a tiny minority of the world's population.

Mike


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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[ggreen61]

Mike--

Thanks to Jimmy Carter back in the late 1970's, he killed the US moving to the metric system to join the modern world. It was too hard for him to understand and convert to...

Greg

 

[Steve Meyerson]

Mike,

I think the metric system is the world "standard". Your comment only made me curious whether the "inches" system used primarily in the U.S. is primary (according to my myopic view). Now I'm not so sure.

Steve

 

[Mike Lewis]

Well, many people here in the UK still prefer to uses inches rather than centimetres and millimetres. But I feel sure that most people whose work involves paper sizes (printers, stationers, graphic designers - perhaps software developers) are more comfortable with the metric system.

I know I am. If you asked me the size of a sheet of A4 paper, I wouldn't hesitate to say 210 by 297 millimetres. I know that is equivalent to eight point something by eleven point something inches, but I would struggle to come up with the exact figure.

(By the way, I didn't know that about Jimmy Carter.)

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[Chris Miller]

Imperial vs metric units.

It's quite easy to see why imperial units were first. The reasoning to have easy references. The reasoning for metric units is the same, just with the slight twist of having readily available references that are precise, and not just roughly by rule of thumb.

The inch was originally a thumb width, later redefined as the length of 3 grains of barley placed end to end lengthwise and that was making it more precise, but not really something that has an eternal precision and truth to it.

It's of course not ignored that the references are not very normative. To overcome imprecisions feet once were a regional unit that was defined from village to village by measuring the length of 10 or 12 people's feet standing in a line and averaging that length.

The punchline is the internationally accepted definition of an inch is 25.4 mm since 1959.

Chriss

 

[Chris Miller]

an inch is 25.4 mm

Or in other words 100 µm times the maximum number of characters in a table field of a DBF.

Until Microsoft discontinued Foxpro and thus made that a constant, the risk was always an extended field size would redefine the inch.

Chriss

 

[Mike Lewis]

On a related point: the great thing about the "A"-series of paper sizes is that the ratio of two adjacent sizes is the square root of two. That might sound a bit arcane, but it means that you can move in steps from one size down to the next by folding the longer side in two.

So A0 is 1,189 mm × 841 mm, which is one square metre. By folding the longer side in two, you get A1 (594 × 841 mm), which is half a square metre. And so on.

A4 is thus one sixteenth of a square metre. This makes it very easy to calculate the weight of a given number of sheets of A4. If one sheet is 80 gsm, then it weighs 80 * (1 / 16) = 5 grams. And a ream (500 sheets) is 2.5 kg.

I know this has absolutely nothing to do with the original question. But it might conceivably be of some very slight interest to someone.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[TamarGranor]

I'm pretty sure Jimmy Carter (who was a nuclear engineer) fully understood the metric system. However, there was tremendous push-back from Americans against the idea of changing. And it appears to be Reagan who finally pulled the plug.

From

https://www.theatlantic.com/educati...metric-system-hasnt-failed-in-the-us/487040/:

"Ford’s Metric Act, however, promised to right that once and for all. And, to a large extent, U.S. businesses that trade internationally went metric (except for their U.S. consumer-facing info). For a brief time, a metric-only U.S. education looked certain, too, though often criticized and opposed by the public largely on the grounds that it simply wasn’t American.

"Then President Ronald Reagan, using public opposition to his advantage, dismantled the U.S. Metric Board in 1982."

Tamar

 

[Steve Meyerson]

A statute mile is 1609.344 meters.

It is also 1760.00000 yards or 5280.0000000 feet. Simple.
A nautical mile? Different story. 1/60th of one degree of latitude or 6076 feet.

Take your pick. My ruler has millimeters on one edge and inches (32nds) on the other.

My (U.S.) education and hardware dimensions here use the Imperial system almost exclusively. My science courses generally used metric.

FWIW, Steve

 

[ggreen61]

Tamar--

Sorry, Tamar, Jimmy Carter was not a Nuclear Engineer. Nuclear Engineering was not a degree anywhere to my knowledge at the time he graduated from the Naval Academy (1947 - see his bio

https://www.usna.edu/Notables/featured/01carter.php).

Additionally, during his years at the Academy, anything nuclear would have most likely been classified and not taught. Nuclear submarines were not available during his time in the Navy either (he was discharged in 1953 which is before the Nautilus was built and commissioned in 1954).

It is believed the first time he actually set foot on a nuclear submarine was when he was president (I joined the Navy in my senior year at Ga Tech as a nuclear officer candidate, was commissioned and served on the USS Woodrow Wilson, SSBN-624 (Gold)). The only other recorded time that he was known to be anywhere close to a reactor was during the accident in Canada where he volunteered in the clean-up.

I don't know what his actual degree was, but it was not Nuclear Engineering and he never saw duty on a nuclear submarine or nuclear surface ship.

And it is correct to say that he was responsible for stopping the US from moving to the metric system. I was in college and I remember his announcement. Reagan, as you pointed out, pulled the final plug.

Greg

 

[Mike Lewis]

Greg,

Tamar didn't say that Jimmy Carter had a degree in nuclear engineering. You can presumably work as a nuclear engineer without having a degree in that subject. (I work as a software developer but I don't have a degree in software engineering or computer science.)

Admittedly, I don't know much about Carter's career. The only thing I remember was that he was involved in his family's peanut business.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[ggreen61]

Sorry again. Jimmy Carter never worked in the nuclear industry either. He became a state senator for Georgia (state level, not national level) and later became the governor. He then worked for the Democratic National Committee and finally became president. He also had his family's peanut farm in south Georgia. Basically, he was a career politician.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Thanks for that, Greg. Very interesting.

I just glanced at the Wikipedia article on Carter. It says that, while in the Navy, he did three month temporary duty with the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C.. And also that he started a six-month college course covering nuclear power plant operation, but he didn't finish it owing to the death of his father. (They cite Peter Bourne's biography of Carter as the source.) Clearly, that doesn't make him a nuclear engineer.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[Steve Meyerson]

(I work as a software developer but I don't have a degree in software engineering or computer science.)

Hi Mike,

I can surely identify with that. I don't think they even had computer science degrees back in time. When they did, I (and you I'm sure) was way ahead of recent c.s. graduates in practical knowledge. Of course since then I've been passed by miles (or should I say kilometers)!

BTW U.S. book stores kept their computer books way back, later put them in front, and gradually moved them back again.

Just my thoughts.

Steve

 

[Mike Lewis]

I don't think they even had computer science degrees back in time.

Steve,

That was certainly the case when I started. I was lucky enough to be hired as a trainee programmer with virtually no qualifications by IBM.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[TamarGranor]

FWIW, when I was a grad student, I taught the son of the guy who'd gotten the first PhD in Computer Science (which happened in 1965). (Looking this up since it was a long time ago, I see that the same year Dick Wexelblat got a CS PhD at Penn--which is where I got mine and where I taught Wexelblat's son, two other people earned CS PhD's. Lots of info at

https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/159591-who-earned-first-computer-science-phd/fulltext.)

I don't know when Penn started offering undergrad CS degrees, but they were doing so by the time I was a freshman in 1974 (though my BA is in Math--I switched to CS for grad school).

Tamar