I confess to being surprised - though I shouldn't be - at the number of replies that consist of, "the OP is dumb." Some of them are expressed in quite a nice way, but still amount to the same thing.
Would a metric tape be easier to use
in this particular application? Possibly ... but possibly not. The circumference is 581", and needs to be divided into 8 segments, each 72-5/8" long. That works out to 14757.4mm in circumference; divided by 8 gives 1844.675mm per part. Which would you rather be adding up ... in your head ... as you are marking it out?
Meanwhile, I have no idea of the OP's context (and oddly, I'm guessing that no one else here does either). It sounds like this might be a one-off; we don't know if this is actually a paying job or just a favor, or even an assignment from the boss. Finding a 30,480mm tape might not be so easy in the US, and probably costs many times as much as an inch-based tape. Guess what? It turns out that even those of us who are perfectly comfortable thinking metric, if we happen to live in a non-metric country, don't actually have control over what the rest of the country does, what merchants offer for sale, or anything else. How odd ... but true. We could whine about it, but meanwhile the project is waiting, and here's a foot-inch tape right at hand.
And still, the whole metric/decimal/fractional debate is utterly beside the point. Regardless of what system you use, you can and will often find yourself dealing with fractions and remainders, or the equivalent thereof. What if you are working with a lathe or mill that has something like a 4mm pitch on the lead screw - or worse yet, a 3 or 6. Now you need to move 125mm. Let's see, how many times does the dial have to go around, and how much will be left over ... ? If you haven't yet dropped a revolution by accident, or forgot to carry the one, or so on, you must either be perfect and therefore should not be associating with the rest of us, OR you just haven't been working very long.
Of course, a DRO would solve the above problem neatly ... just as it would if you were measuring in inches. But it's awfully hard to wrap a DRO around a 581 inch circumference.
Again, it comes as an enormous surprise, but could it possibly be that no system is perfect? Could it be that in fact none is inherently better than another? Perhaps each is simply a language, each one better at saying some things than others, but both capable of conveying every bit of precision needed - ???
And yet, while a few have offered helpful alternatives, no one yet has offered a simple answer to the OP's question: is there a ready source for a 1200" tape marked in inches rather than in feet/inches? I'll offer my simple answer: I don't know.
You're welcome.