@unknownuser said: OK.. then why not ALSO have a premade collection of Materials in a "plugins/folder/materials" directory ? Might be better to grab the materials from components in this case. The idea is that the end user should be able to add new components to that folder and everything updates. Anyway, I "sort of" have it working already now with option 3 (wich was pointed out earlier). Thanks for the suggestion.

(1) Please go to the User Control Panel and fill in the statistics so we can better know about your level and use of SketchUp. (2) Follow the Guide to learn standard Ruby basics, then simple SketchUp Ruby projects, before attempting advanced projects. If you are attempting to program manifold solid features with or for the SketchUp Free edition, then you will need to be a very advanced programmer. Look at the code that others have done in this area first. (It can save you a lot of time.)

Aye.

@driven said: @slbaumgartner said: John, do you have a custom WebKit installed? Or some kind of PDF viewer plugin? Are you insinuating that I may have tampered with my SU instal;) I have the standard WebKit SU WebDialog doesn't seem to use Safari's WebKit built-in PDF — from file “”. MIME Type Description Extensions application/pdf Portable Document Format pdf but instead seems to be using Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in for Web Browsers, Version 9.5.2 — from file “AdobePDFViewer.plugin”. Nice plugin scanner, John! I got Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in for Web Browsers, Version 9.0.0 — from file “AdobePDFViewer.plugin”. So maybe there's a version sensitivity involved? In any case, it seems to support Dan's feeling that PDF display via WebDialog is not reliable from machine to machine.. Steve

Does it happen if you have only your plugin loaded?

Thank you so much...This solved my problem! The one I am using is your second suggestion since the revert method didn't produce what I wanted. The time it takes to save is not much so I am happy. Again thanks!

Just in case here was a discussion about this topic I happened to find. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sketchupruby/ymKyqD_nxBU/AczVTLjFld4J

It's an debug message from V-Ray for SketchUp.

@alexmojaki said: Incidentally, I haven't tested any of this on Windows yet, so we'll see what happens when I try there. This might not be over yet. Aaaand...I'm back! Indeed, this solution doesn't really work on Windows, because as soon as window.blur() is called, it doesn't just remove focus from the dialog, but from the whole Sketchup application! Sketchup goes into the background, yet somehow it is the window that is open according to the taskbar, and if you click on it in the taskbar to try and reopen it it minimises it.

Are you still using SketchUp 6 Pro ? There was a bug in the Geom::Vector3d#angle_between() method that was fixed sometime in the 7.x branch.

I've decided to abandon the tool route. By running outside the tool stack I am able to change the view asynchronously, so the user can navigate without having to explicitly invoke or change tool modes. It's a much more fluid experience, and with the exception of a few minor cases that I think I can work around, it doesn't disrupt tool operation. Thank you for the useful tips, everyone. This is a really fantastic forum!

A component is a skp file that is loaded into SketchUp, from either a local directory (treated as a library,) or from a remote website. Encapsulting skp files within another file container just adds unneeded complexity. If you wish you CAN have a database that keeps track of the directory of components.

@tig said: If the text is 'fixed', but occasionally editable by the user to customize settings, then a file named 'Gcode.ini' could be kept with the .RB file: the user edits that and your code reads its contents as it loads. The text is 'fixed' for a single 3D printer. But one user mey have more then one printer. @aerilius said: but load evals in the top level namespace, so you would have to use constants like DFI1::GCode::File_header to access you plugin's namespace (no local variables, no global variables). Well, I put the load File.join(File.dirname(FILE),'Gcode.ini') inside the class GcodeExporter - and it works - no need for "::" just use the constants. That doesn't mean it is good practice nor that it will work in future versions of sketchup but - 1)it works. 2) it is very simple 3) it gets the job done quickly

Which also leads to the conclusion that the Geom::Transformation class needs a properly overriden comparison methods <=>(), ==(), and eql?() ...

@dan rathbun said: My 1st advice.. do not use the SketchUp API's Set class (because it's a thin wrapper around a C++ collection,) and you cannot be sure of the order of it's elements, especially if you will be sync'ing to another Ruby-side collection such as an Array. Yeah, that seemed to be the problem - Sets are not ordered. Thanks Dan.

This @tig said: (pt1.transform!(tr) and pt2.transform!(tr)) worked very nicely. Thank you.

With thanks again to the 3 Ruby Amigos I will work on implementing your suggestions this weekend.

Cheers Dan, I'm sure a timer before but will revisit... for the moment a couple of us have highjacked Jeffs thread, to work a few thing out... I'll post some bits back here when there usable... john

@jasef said: Dan, we tried WebDialog.allow_actions_from_host() with no luck so far. Correction: this is not an IE10 issue; Win 8 uses IE10 as the default browser, but SketchUp is using IE7 for web dialogs: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729) Google-SketchUp/8.0 (PC) The rules for picking doctype (and hence render engine) is different for embedded IE than browser IE. It's much more conservative in order to preserve application compatibilities. To force WebDialogs to use the latest render mode use the X-UA-Compatible META element. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>

@aerilius said: Maybe there is a way to compile Ruby code directly into JavaScript (without the detour over a slow virtualized Ruby interpreter in JS). @unknownuser said: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyJS)":a0zse4if]RubyJS is a port of Google Web Toolkit to the Ruby programming language. RubyJS trans-compiles Ruby source code to JavaScript, which allows running client-side applications in a web browser.