How to typeset imperial/US customary units, especially in combination with SI/metric units

Question

I am just working on a document (a series of exercises for one of my classes), which uses both the SI and US customary unit systems (different exercises use different systems). I am trying to typeset the units in a consistent way. I am using the excellent siunitx package, and add the US units manually, however, it feels sort of strange to write things like \DeclareSIUnit\inch{in}. Does anybody have any good way of handling a situation like this?

(I could just use ConTeXt, but I want to take advantage of the beamer class.)

If you're uncomfortable with the command names, why not \let\DeclareUSUnit\DeclareSIUnit and \let\US\SI and then you can declare and typset the US units with those commands. We can call this the therapeutic solution. :-) — Alan Munn, Jan 24 '12 at 03:46

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 24 '12 at 03:55

22

Since the only real problem with the siunitx solution is the clash of names, it's simple enough to just create duplicate versions of the siunitx commands so that the semantics match the content:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{siunitx}
\let\DeclareUSUnit\DeclareSIUnit
\let\US\SI
\DeclareUSUnit\inch{in}
\begin{document}

\US{1}{\inch} is \SI{2.54}{\cm}
\end{document}

answered Jan 24 '12 at 03:55

Alan Munn

218,180

1

OK, I have done that, and I feel much better now! Thank you. – Jan Hlavacek Jan 24 '12 at 04:02
2

It's called \DeclareSIUnit because \DeclareUnit is too generic (biblatex also uses 'units'), not to put people off creating non-standard units :-) – Joseph Wright Jul 18 '12 at 20:53
2

But I still have to declare every English unit I want to use. Is there no package with the US system? – Jeff Nov 09 '15 at 01:54
2

@Jeff - The package is called siunitx for a reason... – Mico Nov 13 '17 at 06:21

How to typeset imperial/US customary units, especially in combination with SI/metric units

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