Your measuring tape at home might not provide the correct measuring system (metric or imperial) that you want at the moment, but imagine if it used the popular E-ink displays. This concept measuring tape, the E-Ink Ruler, might be able to solve your problem, as it uses E-ink in order to display the measurements on the tape, and is flexible enough to even help you display the distance in increments in case you want to mark out certain points on your notes in fixed increments. It’s not mentioned how much it would cost in order to come up with such a system, but it would certainly be very useful.