Why are products labelled so, when it makes far more sense to label them as I suggested?

Decimalisation (and in the long term, metrication) is sneaking in... inch by inch... ;-)

Re: 1.76 Pints, 2.2lbs; why not 35.2floz & 2lb 3 1/4oz? May 29 2004, 10:56 PM


Conrad:
Decimalisation (and in the long term, metrication) is sneaking in... inch by inch... ;-)

metre:
Sadly, mm by mm!

I think part of the problem is that many typesetters can't even do halves and quarters (i've seen some appalling attempts) let alone eighths, so they just do decimals.

I'm pleased to note that Windows 2000 has 1/8 3/8 5/8 and 7/8 in it's extended character set.

As an aside; Whilst in a pound shop in Accrington I saw a scale which had metric and pounds divided into 0.05lb intervals all the way up to 2.2lbs. Duh!

S.Cruple wrote

<<
I think part of the problem is that many typesetters can't even do halves and quarters (i've seen some appalling attempts) let alone eighths, so they just do decimals.

I'm pleased to note that Windows 2000 has 1/8 3/8 5/8 and 7/8 in it's extended character set.
>>

This is more to do with the limitation of the ISO-8859-1 character set than with metrication. UNICODE overcomes many of these limitations. Windows 2000 is more or less UNICODE-compliant.