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Subject:English-Metric units in documentation? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, tech -dot- writer1 -at- verizon -dot- net Date:Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:48:54 -0400
Anonymous wondered: <<We (a US-based company) have some equipment to be
sold to customers in North America, Europe and Asia.>>
A preliminary note for context: each jurisdiction's society of
professional engineers will be able to provide clear, expert guidance
on the regulations and standards that constrain what you can and should
do. You'll get some good general advice from techwr-l (including, I
hope, my own advice), but that advice ***must be*** subjected to the
reality check provided by those regulations. For example, I suspect,
but cannot confirm from personal experience, that the CE guidelines
require metric, and they probably also provide good guidance on
engineering tolerances.
<<The equipment requires installation instructions providing
clearances, fixing dimensions and other measurements. In some cases +/-
tolerances are specified. I'm leaning toward providing both units of
measurements in the text and graphics, while doing my best to keep them
clear and uncluttered.>>
I've done this for years in my own field of forestry, and have felt
comfortable doing so for one reason: the inevitable rounding errors
fall well within the limits of the precision required by the users. In
that case, simple conversions to one decimal place using standard
conversion factors are often sufficient and justifiable. If the
tolerances for your products are similarly loose, this may be an
acceptable solution for you too.
But for many engineering specs, tolerances are not optional or loose:
violate them and serious problems can result. Your product developers
are the ones who can define the actual tolerances that are required in
any system of units. Provided they're fluent in using each set of
units, the best solution may not be to blindly convert the measurements
between systems using an arbitrarily precise conversion factor, but
rather to redefine the tolerances from scratch in each system of units.
Then you can use the conversion factors as a reality check to ensure
that nobody screwed up the math.
If you do go with a simple approach based on blind application of a
conversion factor, carefully define the necessary degree of precision,
and work to that level. The necessary level is one at which rounding
errors won't lead to problems.
<I am wondering if there is any standard practice for this, whereby the
producer supplies the information in its home unit of measurement, with
the burden on the customer to convert.>>
It's rarely a good idea to place the burden on the customer. Customers
are not inherently more stupid than product developers, but they're far
less likely to apply the same degree of rigor that you'll apply when
doing conversions; among other things, their main task is using the
product, and that will attract most of their attention. The resulting
lack of rigor will greatly increase the likelihood of error. Quite
apart from the legal implications of such errors, the ethical
considerations alone suggest that you shouldn't place such a burden on
the customers. If they screw up, weasel words may prevent you from
being held legally responsible, but you're still ethically responsible.
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