Scale Bar with dynamic UNITS

AdminMcCormick-Taylor

The scale bar should have the ability to change units when it meets a threshold.  When using Data Driven Pages, the scales are different on every page, and it is not always best to display the scale in either feet or meters.  It would be nice if when the scale reached a certain point, that the user can enter, the units will automatically change to either inches or miles, or centimeters or kilometers.  This should work up or down. 
 

PaulDukas

I would suggest, if there is a need to mix scale units, ie. feet or miles, between plotted pages, then it would likely benefit the end user of the map or drawing, to have both bar scales... include both to provide a better map product to you user or client, and insure they are proper usable scales.

Side comment  on scales: If you are creating a hard copy map (printed or plotted), the scale of the drawing is sloppy or not user friendy.  Maps or drawings should follow old school practices... so that users of hard copy maps can use standard scales. For example, an engineers scale uses multiple units of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60, say, feet to the inch.  The plotted drawing, say a tax map, delevers a scale of 1" = 185' because it fits on the size of paper specified. Now the user must go through some mathematical relationships to figure out what the distance is from point A to Point B... there is no engineer's scale for 185.  A proper scale the drawing should be plotted to is 200, a scale factor of the engineer's 20 scale.  Why we should plot drawings or maps to a proper scale is that the computer should work for us and and it helps users eliminate making errors calculating a distance with a non standard scale.  This applies to engineering, architectual, and ratio scales.  Just because the drawing contains a "bar" scale, is not a reason for ignoring proper scale etiquette.