I ship fabric by the metre in amounts like 12.75 m; does the packing list add them up exactly?

Example: four bolt ends for a tailor in Jeddah

A fabric shop in Riyadh sends a tailor in Jeddah what is left of four bolts of thobe fabric: 12.75 m and 8.5 m, plus two small pieces of 0.1 m and 0.2 m as swatches. We entered them in the Packing-list generator with the unit m, and the summary read:

• Item lines: 4.
• Total quantity: 21.55 m.

For comparison, plain floating-point arithmetic, as used by many programs, turns 0.1 + 0.2 into 0.30000000000000004, because those decimals cannot be stored exactly in binary. The tool avoids this by turning each quantity into a whole number at six decimal places before adding, then back again. So what you see in the summary is what lands in the PDF, with no long tail of zeros and nines.

How to type the quantities

• A decimal point works: 12.75.
• A single comma is read as a decimal comma too: 12,75 becomes 12.75.
• Careful with a comma and three digits: 12,750 is read as twelve thousand seven hundred and fifty, not 12.75 metres, because it looks like a thousands separator. Use a point to avoid the mix-up.
• Arabic-Indic digits work: ١٢٫٧٥ is read as 12.75.
• A quantity must be above zero and no more than one million.

The unit: spell it the same on every line

Quantities are grouped by the unit text exactly as typed. If two lines say m and a third says 'metre', you get two separate totals, one per spelling, plus an overall figure with no unit. Pick one spelling and keep it for the whole list. If you leave the unit empty it is filled in as pcs, which is obviously wrong for fabric, so watch for it.

Tips for fabric shipments

1. Put the fabric name, colour and bolt number in the description, for example 'White thobe fabric, bolt 3'.
2. Give each bolt its own line with the package it is in, so the receiver can measure each one and match it.
3. Measure the metres just before rolling, not from the supplier's invoice, since offcuts vary.
4. If you have prices from suppliers with different bolt lengths, compare the price per metre with the Unit-price comparison tool, because a packing list carries no prices.