LC has no easy way to change units of an existing drawing

I am writing this because there is another thread that addresses this issue but it is too old to reply to.  I wanted to add another workaround that I stumbled on that was easier for me to do than the solution offered in the old thread.

1. Create a new drawing in the units you want, for example: mm.
2. Import the original drawing that has units in, say, inches, as a block.
3. Place the block at the new drawing origin.  Escape to end the import block operation.
4. Voila, the original drawing magically appears in the new units.
5. Select the entire drawing and explode it.

That worked for me.  This behaviour suggests that it would be easy for the developers to create a feature to convert units of an existing drawing.

The old thread is here:

http://forum.librecad.org/How-to-change-units-from-inches-to-mm-td5710754.html

If you are talking about the labels on existing dimensions there is:
Current Drawing Preferences -> Dimensions -> Format Units -> Linear Units
switch between decimal and architectural.

If you are saying that your method actually converts the units via calculation,
then you already know more than I do... ;-]

Unfortunately our dimensions expert (rallaz) is missing.

It's not so straight forward to clean up:

1, allow drawing units in drawing actions; like the coordinate widget;
2, allow dimension units (could be different);

Allan found the DXF file format handles units properly, and thanks to Rallaz.

One question I have is, what is different when a drawing is imported as a block?  Can that behaviour somehow be leveraged when you open a drawing in inches and change the units to mm in the Drawing Preferences widget?

I do see your point about dimensions, dxli.  The drawing preference settings for dimension extension line, arrow size, gap, offset etc. would have to change proportionally.

Let's consider the current design:

1, there's a drawing unit, which is taken from DXF file reading, and all coordinates in LC are in this unit;
2, when importing a drawing (say B) to another drawing (say A, already opened in LC), LC will read the unit from the DXF file for B and convert all units to the unit in use (of A);
3, there's currently no API in LC itself to change the drawing units (say, for A), and the functionality of unit conversion in step 2 is from the DXF file reader (thanks to rallaz).

It might be possible to cleanup to LC design to allow unit changes on the fly, but I won't say it's easy.

It's clearly a good feature to have. Need more developers.

Allan.W.Macdonald wrote

I do see your point about dimensions, dxli.  The drawing preference settings for dimension extension line, arrow size, gap, offset etc. would have to change proportionally.