Display units better for squared, cubed, and micro

[GregSands]

While LabVIEW supports units (partly), the lack of ability to display them nicely in the Unit Label can make for ugly front panels where they're used.  A couple of small changes that would improve things would be:

• to render "^2" as "²" and "^3" as "³" (that covers probably 99% of unit exponents used)
• to render "u" as "µ"

The Unit Editor doesn't need to change, nor the way units are typed in, but these changes could then be automatically applied.  All three characters exist in most fonts.

[yenknip]

I think this idea is related to both subscript and superscript, and the unicode ideas.

Greek letters are amongst the characters that are supported by labels, but there is definately a requirement for LabVIEW to support extended character sets.

I think it would be irritating if 'u' were to automatically change itself to mu, 'µ'. I can see an argument for the automatic superscript - however, I would probably still turn it off by default. 

[KeithTK]

I would add two more additions/modifications to the display of units:

One would be propagation of the unit prefix.  If I set a control or a constant to have units of 'um' and create an indicator through the right-click menu the unit becomes 'm'.  Prefixes are useful to display convienent ranges and propagating the target prefix should be no more difficult than propagating the base unit itself.

The other would be the display of units on block diagram constants.  Currently units appear floating next to the constant: 

When using automatic tool selection this makes it difficult to connect a wire to the constant if the unit is displayed. 

A better alternative (or at least an available option) would be to encapsulate the unit within the constant border:

This improves readability and lets the automatic tool selection function properly.

[tst]

> A better alternative (or at least an available option) would be to encapsulate the unit within the constant border

That might not be a bad idea for FP numerics too. I suggest you post that as a new idea.

An alternative implementation would be to add a numeric formatting code to display the unit, which will allow us to do this using the existing tools (today it looks like the unit is displayed automatically, but only when converting using the Format into String primitive).

[Stephen_C]

If you need a µ,² or ³ hold alt and type 0181, 0178 or 0179.

Steve

[rowdyr]

Agree. One of the many reason units are not used more often. Perhaps it was acceptable 20 years ago but now in the age of sleek iPhone apps, m^3 looks kind of lame. I would go one further and have support for display of multiline units. Perhaps this could be expanded into a general equation writer like display indicator.