Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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There wasn't a typo, m(m2) means milli * meters^2 so 1 m^2 = 1000 m(m^2), it was being displayed as intended.
OS was using m^2 up until 1.9.0 when it was changed to cm^2 to align with the E+ idd. That prompted the display change from m2 to m(m2). I'm fairly certain that OS 1.4 was using m2 as the units, so 20000 m(m2) would be the correct conversion as we are increasing by a factor of 1,000. See this bug.
Now when you look at this value in OS 1.11.0 the displayed units are cm2, but in actuality they are still m(m2). The value would have to be multiplied by a factor of 10 to be correctly displaying in cm^2. This would point to a potential version translation bug, but not to the effect that you're describing.
There is a bug addressed in OS right now with respect to the unit conversion from in^2 to cm^2 (see here). This was grandfathered in from the change from m^2 to cm^2 when the display units were m(m2). The units were being displayed as intended but they weren't being changed by a factor of 10 when the idf was generated to convert to cm^2. When the display was changed to cm2 the value was now correctly translated to the idf but the conversion to in^2 was now incorrect.
In the end, the idf has not been correctly generated for a while as the conversion from 'm(m2)' (10^-3 m^2) to 'cm2' (10^-4 m^2) was not being accounted for. This shouldn't be an issue anymore as the display units are cm2, there will be a version translation issue that will cause values to be off by a factor of 10, but not by 10,000.
