Sure…
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This has actually led to some problems for me recently. I was cutting some leather yesterday and it detected as “standard” leather but that didnt tell me how thick “standard” is. None of my cuts would go through, so I had to pick manually from the list, measure with my calipers, change operations to manual to check the thickness that was set, and compare that to the measured thickness. So in this case it actually caused me a bit of extra work and a little bit of headache.
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i mean, i understand the danger of providing options for everyone’s taste and preference and end up with an irreversibly cluttered UI, but this seems like a good area to have one. the default can easily remain thin / standard / whatever, with a tickbox buried in the settings to use “actual” dimensions (and you can even put a warning about the standards / focus change / etc to insure against complaints from novice users).
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I personally am not a fan of subjective wording or naming. It provides little to no context. It’s more frustrating than going to a restaurant and asking for a small and they tell you they only have medium, large, and extra large.
It’s the reason why we moved away from arbitrary measurements to the metric system etc as well. I’d rather have a number that might be off by a few microns than have a subjective word that only makes sense to its creator.
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Leather though, albeit from only my reading, seems to vary quite a bit and is more referred to as some measure of ounces, right? Ahh…so I see what you mean I think. Despite folks selling leather in “ounces”, if Glowforge could provide settings based on the leather’s thickness, perhaps that would get one closer to where one needs to be to cut through it?
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The label on the leather itself just says thin, standard, etc. I’m pretty sure I received a thick piece of leather with a “standard” sticker on it by accident, which means 2 things:
1 - I have no way of knowing what they think standard is. Is it 2-3 oz or 5 oz? Still don’t know.
2 - obviously whoever put the stickers on that leather didn’t know what thickness “standard” was either, because the settings it gave me were for leather about half as thick as the piece that was actually in there.
It’s just a bad idea to have non measurement based names IMO
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Also the new proofgrade ply has a “medium” designation now. I have no idea what that means. Is it width? Thickness? Gloss level? Is it psychic?
The full dimensions are almost the same amount of characters as the word medium. 12x20x1/8.
Just out that and save everyone the trouble of finding a Rosetta Stone to translate that word to measurements.
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Ah, I gotcha. The 
is labeled thin, etc…I gotcha now…shucks!
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I’m not certain, but I think I put that in to support. You may want to back that up with them as well.
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Interesting. The PG leather that I have does specify the OZ weight. I got three different weights (1 oz, 2-3 oz and 5/6 oz) and that info is on the bar code for mine. Perhaps yours is from an older batch, since you’ve had your PRU much longer than I?
Some of the PG leather also indicates “thick”, etc. As a leatherworker, I’m inclined to disagree with their terminology as far as “thick” goes (they’re calling 5/6 oz leather “thick”, but I think most leatherworkers would consider thick leather to be more along the lines of 8/10 oz) … but that’s another rabbit hole. Will refrain from going too far down that one until I’ve had the chance to run a couple more experiments, and also until I’ve shared my observations w/support.
Edited to add, preemptively - I love the PG leather, so don’t freak out on that last comment, people! Nothing is wrong with it, I just have some questions and suggestions and would like to run those by support before I share them here 
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Yea, in the US ounces are still used, most of the rest of the world switched to thickness in mm. You can find plenty of places online that show you the ounce/mm conversion. here’s a chart Tandy posts on their website.
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I think Glowforge is probably topping out at about 3mm leather, (7.5 ounce) which would make that their “think” product.
My (admittedly cheap) caliper reads their “thick” leather as 2.25 mm. The GF shop says the thick leather is 5/6 oz - which seems about right based on your chart/my measurement. There’s no way it’s 7+ oz - even without measurements and charts, I can tell that just by feel. That’s why I’m saying that “thick” is a misnomer here.
Not trying to be argumentative, so I sincerely hope it does not come off that way. Just noticing that this terminology does not jive with my knowledge/experience.
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I’m pretty sure what happened is they just changed the naming convention to remove measurements on the stickers. I just got this leather last week.
They gave me a 5-6oz piece marked standard. It appears they just put the wrong sticker on it, based on what popped up in the UI when the gf scanned it.
This is what the sticker looks like. It says “standard natural leather”.
I had this same thing happen last year with Amazon. I kept ordering 1/4" aluminum u-channel from them and they would send me 2" u-channel because their labels were either small, medium, or large. I called customer service every day and they would overnight me another 8ft long piece of 2" u-channel labeled “medium”. I’d tell them the label was wrong and they just need to measure it before shipping it out, but nope. Out would come another “medium”. They stopped asking me to return them because the shipping was too much. After they messed up the 8th time I broke down and had to order from a place that had them for 4x as much, but at least their labels were accurate. I still have 8 pieces of 2" u-channel in my shed worth about $300. They probably paid that much to overnight them to me too.
All that to say, subjective labels are bad news.
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Lol, don’t think that at all 
My point was simply this is “thick” leather from the Glowforge’s perspective, which has nothing at all to do with the rest of the world!
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Oh yep, that’s different than what I see on my 5-6 oz PG
Well then, I guess we were actually saying the same thing! 
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strongly agree. i get the point of obfuscating some things, especially in tech, with the aim of increasing the user friendliness quotient, for lack of a better term, but i really think physical measurements are a place that that is 100% not the way to go.
i mean, unlike things like specific laser power, we deal with physical sizes every day of our lives, so they’re very intuitive to grasp. eschewing the labels entirely just to prevent one tiny bit of confusion in the UI is more than a little strange to me.
…i mean, and i’m asking an honest question, how is this really a superior solution than fixing the UI to avoid the confusion? it seems a little like bending over backwards just to avoid any sort of explanation.
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All materials should always be labeled with thickness in mm. They can throw whatever descriptive terms they want on there, or put some silly American† measurements on there in addition, but the thickness in mm is needed for ease of comparing the thickness of different materials (which use different measuring standards in the US), not to mention being able to sell stuff anywhere outside the US.
† Yes, I’m a silly American. But as a trained scientist I have a better intuitive feel for mm than fractions of inches. And how in the world am I supposed to know what “5 oz” leather is supposed to mean without looking at some reference chart? An ounce is a unit of force‡, not a unit of length. You wouldn’t measure thickness in newtons, would you? So why ounces? Bizarre.
‡ No, it’s not a unit of mass. Nor is a pound a unit of mass. Yes, people pretend it’s mass, and you’ll see conversion between pounds/ounces and grams, but those are only valid when in a gravitational field of a very specific strength. Go to the moon and your mass in kg will remain the same, but your weight (which is expressed in units of force) will drop.
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Couldn’t agree more. I didn’t know about leather but PCB copper thickness is also in ounces and I always have to look that up.
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… do you really hate the economic and technological powerhouses that are Myanmar and Liberia enough to use millimeters?
And yes the whole ‘ounce as a unit of width’ thing really blows my mind.
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