The General unit is the active document's units: Preferences > Units >
General sets them (one undo step) and is the units new documents start
in (and the unit shown with no document open); Document Setup changes
only the document. The Transform panel, Properties, the Control bar, the
Info panel, rulers, the status bar, Align spacing, Tabs, paragraph
indents, Pattern Options, dialog distances (Move, shape sizes, path
dialogs, Artboard Options, effect distances, Transform Each, parameter
dialogs), New Document and the canvas measurement labels (smart-guide
sizes, moves, the Measure tool, the Live Corners radius) all follow it,
live. Units > Type drives font size, leading and baseline shift; Units >
Stroke also reaches the Appearance panel and the Magic Wand weight
tolerance. Typed units ("5 mm", "12 pt") work in any field; all ten
units are choices; length preferences show in their unit and accept a
unit; offset/simplify/grid/type-size params read typed units. Typed text
starting with a multi-byte character no longer panics the parser.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
