Metric text conversion to imperial

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Many state dept. of transportations across the US were forced by the Feds into converting to metrics in the 1990's, only to abandon metrics a decade later. Unfortunately this means converting 10 year old DGNs from metric to imperial. I can handle the unit and coordinate and scale conversion with no problem. The most tiresome part of the conversion, however, is swapping numeric values in text. If you have a text element that contains the characters "0.91 m cherry tree", the CADD operator has to whip out their calculators and convert 0.91 to feet, and then perform a swap text on the text element and replace "0.91 m" with "2.98'" or "3'". Is there any macro/MDL/VBA that makes this task easier? From a programming point it can't be that difficult an application to write. I've googled but come up empty on a tool/solution to accomplish this wearisome task.