5 September 2002 POSC Universal Units Converter 1.1 Copyright (c) 1999-2002, POSC. All rights reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT IS THE POSC UNIVERSAL UNITS CONVERTER? It is a units conversion program that easily and quickly shows equivalencies for everything from common units such as feet in a mile to obscure units such as therms in a joule. A calculator function is included with the converter to allow easy conversion from any number of units to the equivalent number of "other" units. Units are indexed by categories. This lets you find all the valid units for a specific category. For example, for the category "frequency," you can easily see the valid units are cycles/second, Hertz, radians/second and revolutions/minute. (The converter then lets you convert any of these units to any of the other units.) As an alternative, the units can be categorized by the base dimensional unit. For example, the "metre" is the base dimensional unit for all categories of "length" (e.g., "length tube diameter", "length midrange", "length earth surface").

The POSC Universal Units Converter is based on POSC standard reference data for units conversion. It comes preloaded with the current units reference data as defined in the POSC Specifications. ----------------------------------------------------------------- VERSION This is Version 1.1 of the POSC Universal Units Converter. This is a free upgrade for all registered users. Just uninstall the old version and install the new version. ----------------------------------------------------------------- SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS The POSC Universal Units Converter is written in Tcl/Tk and runs on either UNIX or Windows 9x/NT. To use the program therfore, you must have first installed Tcl/Tk 8.0 or newer on your system. The latest version of Tcl/Tk is available from Scriptics Corporation at the following URL: http://www.scriptics.com/. ----------------------------------------------------------------- INSTALLATION AND USE - On UNIX: 1) Uncompress the file UConvert-11.tar.Z in a directory of your choice. This will result in a new subdirectory called UConvert which contains the executable, UConvert, and all other necessary files. e.g. - % cd /myprogramdir % uncompress UConvert-11.tar.Z % tar -xf UConvert.tar 2) You may need to edit the second line of the executable file UConvert to point to the Tcl/Tk 8.0 version of wish on your system. To execute the program: % cd /myprogramdir/UConvert % UConvert& - On Windows: Extract the files from UConvert-11.zip into a directory of your choice, ( e.g., c:\Program Files\POSC\ ). This will result in a new subdirectory called UConvert which contains the executable, UConvert.tcl, and all other necessary files. To execute the program: Double click on the UConvert.tcl file in the installation directory (e.g., C:\Program Files\POSC\UConvert). Note: For the above to work, you must have associated the .tcl file extension with a version of wish 8.0. The default installation of Tcl/Tk from Scriptics does this for you automatically. ----------------------------------------------------------------- UNINSTALL - On both UNIX and Windows: Remove the directory in which you initially uncompressed the files. ----------------------------------------------------------------- CUSTOMIZATION Users who always utilize the same categories of units may want to manually edit the .dat files to add something like "-" in front of the approprite "q," values. For example, changing "{q,length}" to "{q,-length}" in the poscUnitsConv.dat file would result in the Epicentre qantity type "length" being listed alphabetically first in the Quantity Type field as "-length". ----------------------------------------------------------------- ISSUES All calculations are done using double precision math. This causes some loss of precision for certain conversions. A higher level of precision for calculations is possible using a Tcl extension. If you have an interest in seeing high precision calculations added to UConvert, please contact help@posc.org. ----------------------------------------------------------------- LICENSE This program is distributed as shareware. If you find it useful and use it for more than a trial period of 30 days, you are asked to pay POSC a fee of $10.00 US. The fee is payable in US dollars drawn on a US bank. See the Registration file for details on how to pay the shareware fee and register your usage of this software. See the License file for the software license agreement. ----------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO CONTACT POSC POSC Suite 450 9801 Westheimer Houston, TX 77042 Voice: +1 (713) 784-1800 Fax: +1 (713) 784-9219 Web: http://www.posc.org To report bugs, provide suggestions for improvement or ask questions about this product, please email help@posc.org.