@martinrinehart said: @scetchnscribble said: I'm looking for a few simple, but well written, examples to learn from. I'm looking for Ruby writers to test drive chapters 18 and 19: http://www.martinrinehart.com/models/tutorial/ Should get you from Ruby to checkboxes fast. I'll be looking at it - several of my scripts would benefit from web-dialogs and the ability to keep them open whilst you tweak stuff interactively... Later this week I'll try and feed-back...

Yeah, I use start_operation and abort_operation in pretty much every script. They work with the "undo stack". So if you write a script that loops 20 times and adds a line in each loop, SketchUp will count that as 20 separate operations. So to fix wthat, you can do: ` model.start_operation "Line Adder" code to add my lines.... model.commit_operation` By wrapping the code within the start and commit operations, it all just turns into a single commend. So ctrl-z (or EDit > Undo) will undo all 20 lines in one shot. AND the "Line Adder" text will be displayed in the Edit > Undo menu. Chris

@martinrinehart said: See Chapter 20, when I finish it, for a thorough answer. Quick answer: Depends on content. Just text? innerHTML is far easier. Want to add a table? innerHTML is the hard way. Isn't there also innerText for adding just pure text? Though - this might be IE only...

It IS possible but I'd not recommended it... Best if a Component's base geometry is left on Layer0 and the Instances are placed on Specific Layers in each Model that way you can have some 'trees' on and some off by having them on TREE-PH01 and TREE-PH02 layers for example... An outline to do what you want is a tool you run and it asks you for a folder to process, starting in the Components folder. You navigate to say your 'Trees' folder and pick one of the SKPs in there. Now it knows which folder to process. Now asks for the Layer name - it could read the base-folder name and capitalize it and truncate to 4 characters to suit AIA standards etc - in the dialog you [accept or] enter a name - say 'TREE' for the layer. It then imports each SKP file in turn as a Component. It takes that Component-Definition's entitles [and any sub-component-instance definition's entities ?] and puts them onto a Layer called 'TREE'. It then exports that Component back into the same location, overwriting the original. All SKPs are processed. You do a folder of similar Components at a time. You might need some pre-processing thinking and say split your Planting into folders like Trees, Shrubs, etc IF you want separate layers for these... My import_from_folder.rb is an example of how to import files... perhaps more applicable my batchEraseFlatInstances.rb which does something similar to what you want, BUT that goes through a list of SKPs in a selected folder - imports them, edits them to erase 'flat' instances within them and then does a save_as on the definition back to where it was...* The changing of layers etc is also to be found in many scripts available here and could be substituted for the erase 'flat'... part of this script*...

@thomthom said: I changed the Screen Text and the Leader Text in Model Info - but none of that affected the text produced by view.text. In a way I hope that it doesn't use the setting of any of these - as calculating the position of text would be completely impossible if it did (as oppose to just difficult if it's fixed.) You are quite right - I quickly did the test using Chris's Bender Script that puts up 'start' and 'end' text, BUT I now discover that this text isn't view.text at all, as I had thought - it's actually some plain leader-text that is added then deleted ! Sorry for the confusion Seems that the draw.text IS predetermined and unchangeable after all

In a former life, I founded and ran an Xbase (dBASE, Clipper, FoxPro, ...) aftermarket company. It was successful as we had two excellent marketing channels. The Clipper community had about 40 active clubs, nationwide. A press release about your latest and 40 stamps was all it took to appear in 40 newsletters. There was also a small magazine, DataBased Advisor that was read avidly by Xbasers. A full page ad wasn't expensive and almost every reader was your potential buyer. I'm trying to think of ways to reach my audience: SketchUp newbies. Best I'm coming up with is to turn promptly to treeware, as the newbie might head to Amazon when s/he finds out that SU has a bit of a learning curve. Treeware in the age of YouTube.

This could be interesting: Entities.intersect_with http://code.google.com/intl/nb/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/entities.html#intersect_with Also means you need a real Face to intersect your lines with. But it will correctly intersect faces that has holes in it. You'd need to create a temporarily face (inside a group I'd recommend) large enough to cover the entities you want to intersect. You could make it as large as the scene boundary. Then iterate over the faces you want to intersect, filter out those edges where the vertices lie on your intersecting face. Intersect the faces with your intersect_face.

You will need to create a tool class that lets you right click on a component. Then it should check that component to see if it is one of yours, probably by checking for an attribute_dictionary that should put on your special components. I'll write up a quick example of how to amke a tool that right clicks, Chris

If only the 3D drawing methods would draw something other than solid black fill...

Also my 2D Polyline Edit Tool effectively lets you relocate a Polyline's Vertices by picking on them and their new location, one at a time... See its code for how it does those transformations, with a 'ghost polyline' till you end it...

Tossed everything, went "mushin", empty mind, back to the api, and found in one line, exactly what I was trying to do: new_transformation = Geom::Transformation.new(point,vector_z) Sigh.....what was I thinking before?-(, Thanks for trying to help.

The right-hand rule: imagine holding the face's normal vector [axis' if you will] in your right-hand, with you thumb pointing in the + direction. Your fingers will curl counter-clockwise. That rule applies to a face's outer_loop's vertices array. It also applies to rotations etc about an axis etc... It's opposite for any inner_loops vertices array - i.e. clockwise. It doesn't matter which direction/order the face's edges were originally drawn: an array of the loop's vertices is always returned ordered in that particular way - ccw or cw. The vertices' order does affect the face's normal when drawing faces: however, SUp does seem to have that overriding rule to draw a face with its normal pointing down IF the face's Z=0 !!!

I have no experiences with .so files.

I hope Mr. Someone comes back and finished the job...

Where is the Su2SmallPt.rb :-), Nice post.

Updated all of the tests so only load is not built in methods... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=188743#p188743

Martin is/was making it far too complex... it even converted the group to a pointless component ? KISS... Jim's example is the better way to do it... Explode the group at the end if desired...

Not something you can make changes to existing tools. But when creating your own tool it should be possible.

Again, I have to recommend Firebug Lite. It has a full featured Javascript console plus HTML DOM and CSS browsers. It works on IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome and you can add it to any HTML doc with only one (long) line: <a href="javascript&#058;var firebug=document.createElement('script');firebug.setAttribute('src','http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js');document.body.appendChild(firebug);(function(){if(window.firebug.version){firebug.init();}else{setTimeout(arguments.callee);}})();void(firebug);">Firebug Lite</a> http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

I think CouchDB is an interesting project, too.