Why are my detailed cabinet dimensions rounding down?

[courtneykish]

I drop a base cabinet in the plan.  I change the dimension manually to 17.7".  Chief is rouning down to 17-11/16"

I have played around with the dimension settings and nothing is working.  Is there a solution to this?

Thank you!

 

 

Chief Architect Premier X14

Windows 11 Pro

AMD Ryzen 7 3800X

 

[TeaTime]

No, I don't believe so - entering in fractional inches, 1/16 is the smallest the Size fields allow, so even entering in 17.7, it's rounding to 17.6875", the nearest 16th.

[Chopsaw]

If you are rounding to the nearest 16th then 17.7 is actually 17 11/16".  Perhaps if you are working to those levels of accuracy you should be using decimal inches ?

 

11/16" is .6875"    Not so say these issues never happen in chief.  If you are primarily using single dimension strings for precise details of fixed dimensions I would set up a special dimension set to use Distance Rounding rather than the default Grid Rounding.

[Chopsaw]

6 minutes ago, TeaTime said:

entering in fractional inches, 1/16 is the smallest the Size fields allow

 

Not on my version of chief although I do typically have it set up that way for normal design work. 

 

[courtneykish]

Thanks.  It looks like I may just have to start over.  The plan was built in imerial dimensions and my client decided to use a European cabinetry line that is in metric.  I was hoping to just show the secondary dimensions in metric, but I need it to be accurate.  

[TeaTime]

1 minute ago, Chopsaw said:

Not on my version of chief although I do typically have it set up that way for normal design work. 

Not sure what you mean by that - various fields in chief have different minimums, some 1/16, some much less. If you open a cabinet spec and set it's width to 24 1/32" it'll correct it to 24 1/16". Even setting Num Style to Dec Inches, it'll change to .0625, not .03125.

 

But, yes, manually drawn dimension lines set to Decimal will display 17.6 using Grid Rounding, 17.7 using Distance rounding.

[Chopsaw]

Not a problem.  Not the best situation but it is workable in an imperial template.  Just enter the dimensions in metric and display them in metric.

[TeaTime]

1 minute ago, courtneykish said:

I was hoping to just show the secondary dimensions in metric, but I need it to be accurate.  

Oh boy that's something else entirely - yeah if all dimensions in the plan are metric, then using a Metric plan will be less of a headache overall.

[TeaTime]

Dontcha just love getting two entirely different reactions -- Chopsaw's right, you can absolutely adjust your dimensions to display in metric regardless of the plan being an imperial one, but on one hand it's simply a matter of what's more a pain: re-adjusting your various dimension defaults? Or redrawing on a metric plan?

However, you also need to remember that there's a lot more that's locked in Metric / Imperial, like Schedules and Materials Lists. Again though it just depends on the scope of the plan, but I like to err of the side of caution. I'd redraw.

[courtneykish]

Thanks Tea Time and Chopsaw.  Looks like it is back to the drawing board.

[Chopsaw]

5 minutes ago, courtneykish said:

Looks like it is back to the drawing board.

 

Not completely.   I assume you have mostly completed plan in and imperial template for a project that is to be built in imperial measure.

 

If you are unable to enter the proper metric sizes then it may be possible to do the European cabinets in a separate metric plan file and reference that to the imperial file.

[MarkMc]

24 minutes ago, courtneykish said:

Looks like it is back to the drawing board.

Change defautls.

Dimension defaults

 

Cabinet Defaults, Number Style

Result

You could also change the label to work if need be

[Kbird1]

1 hour ago, courtneykish said:

Thanks Tea Time and Chopsaw.  Looks like it is back to the drawing board.

 

If you need to work in metric to be accurate in the current Plan, why not just display the Secondary Dimension with it set to mm? 

and use it to enter Dims, if needed in metric ( *make sure to type mm after the entered value otherwise Chief will assume inches.)  

 

And set the Primary Dim. to 2 place decimal Inches  ( could use 1 dec. place if preferred. )

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

[DBCooper]

You can use metric sized cabinets in an imperial plan but they may not be as accurate as you want.  I believe the width will always be rounded to the nearest 1/16" no matter how you enter the size (as pointed out by Tea Time).  This is the same for the depth but for some reason you can enter an accurate height if you want.

 

First, change the "number style" to "decimal inches" to see what numbers Chief is actually using in the dialog.

 

If you enter "450mm" into the cabinet width, the program will convert that into 17.6875" which is 449.26 mm.  The Chief cabinet will be smaller then the real one by less than 1 mm.  

 

If you enter 17.75", this would be 450.85 mm so the Chief cabinet will be larger then the real one by less than 1 mm.

 

There is no way that I know of to enter exactly 17.7165" to give you an accurate 450 mm wide cabinet. I think this has something to do with how Chief stores these numbers under the hood.

 

In the real world, no one is going to care about being off by less than a millimeter.  The biggest problem is that when you have a row of cabinets then these small amounts can add up to something that might matter.

 

The way I would probably handle this is to use the slightly larger cabinet size (17.75") and then make sure I have a filler somewhere to make up any difference if I need to scribe to a wall or fill any gaps.  At installation time, I think it is much better to have a real cabinet that is slightly smaller then to have one that is slightly larger.

 

As far as what dimensions show in a plan view, you should be able to get those to show whatever you want.  If all else fails, you can always just manually override them.

 

[Chopsaw]

18 minutes ago, DBCooper said:

As far as what dimensions show in a plan view, you should be able to get those to show whatever you want.  If all else fails, you can always just manually override them.

 

Good Point DB.  I had never anticipated using dimension overrides for this purpose but if it works to beat chief at their own game then Bravo !

[rgardner]

18 hours ago, TeaTime said:

If you open a cabinet spec and set it's width to 24 1/32" it'll correct it to 24 1/16"

I believe that one of the programmers mentioned that the cabinet dbx will take down to 1/32" but will only report to 1/16" (iow it will round the number but the cabinet itself will be accurate to 1/32").

[Dermot]

There is lots of good info in the above posts, but also some confusion.  Unfortunately, there is no single rule that applies to everything in Chief Architect so it will depend on what type of object and what type of data you are actually looking at.

 

For example, we have code for cabinets that always rounds the width and depth to the nearest 1/16" for imperial plans and to the nearest mm for metric plans.  This is done based on how we store the data in memory and on disk and is a holdover from the days when memory and disk space were much more limited.  The code that we use for handling the heights doesn't have this same limitation since we completely changed it a few years ago to make the heights more consistent throughout the whole program.

 

We also have some newer things that were added to cabinets that are more accurate, such as door/drawer overlaps and reveals.  It is possible to set your reveal to a very small value such as 1/64" or even a fraction of a mm and the program should keep this value.

 

The thing that makes this a bit more confusing is that the dialog box might be set to display the values rounded to the nearest 1/16" or mm.  The best way to see what your actual value stored is would be to use the "Number Style" button from any dialog box and set it to display using "Decimal Inches" instead of "Fractional Inches".  Or, if you are in a metric plan, you can make sure you are displaying "Decimal Millimeters" instead of just "Millimeters" (which should be the default).

 

If you want to know how accurate any given dialog box control is, you can then type in something like 1/32" and if the dialog shows you 0.0625" then you will know it is being rounded to the nearest 1/16" and if shows you 0.03125" then you know it will allow you to specify the value as accurate as you like.  In a metric plan, you can type in 0.25 mm and see if the program will round it to 0 mm or not.

 

Please note that our long term goal is to make all of the values we store as accurate as possible, but it might take us a while to get there.  If there is a particular value for a particular type of object that you would like us to make more accurate, then please submit a feature request asking for what you want.  We will then evaluate it further to see if it is something we can do sooner rather than later.

 

I hope this information helps to clarify some of these things.