Thanks that looks nice. I thought about that at first. I can make a component out of the selection and save out to a file or just keep the component on a layer in the current file. It doesn't quite work for what I want here, because I want these views to be something the user can edit while they are in. Not necessary change geometry, but we have a lot of attributes, and while they are in their search view want them to be able to select an item to change its name, material, etc. If I have them working in a copy it would be problem to get it back into the model, in particular since the selection isn't just object in a single group, but pieces from all over the model hierarchy.

Sketchup.active_model.rendering_options['ForegroundColor'] = color works fine for draw_text method. However there is a very weird side effect, probably because the change of rendering is done within the draw method of a Tool. This effect is that the SU main window seems to loose the focus, so that any call to UI.messagebox or UI.inputbox is blocked and does not show the dialog box (you have to press Alt to unlock this situation). I did not find a way to circumvent this side effect. Fredo

@thomthom said: You're missing a puts. @thomthom said: > def onCancel(reason,view) > @web_dialog.close > end > Do you need to close the webdialog here? It does not stop the Tool. It is just a single stage tool. If an user presses escape I want to close the webdialog and deactivate.the_tool. Invoking @dlg.set_on_close {Sketchup.active_model.active_view.remove_observer ProperTool::get_view_observer; **Sketchup.active_model.select_tool(nil)**} will close the tool... and will trigger @web_dialog.close again. That is why it fires up twice.

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." H. Ford There is no doubt that JavaScript is the best language for code running in the browser. Ruby is absolutely the best choice for SketchUp plugins. For similar reasons we've chosen HTML and CSS. However, if you know a man whose pet Python is named Monty, you may infer something about his personal language choice. (Monty just reminded me that van Rossum works for Google. There's hope.)

@hfm said: Well yeah, I/we have been ranting about updating IE. But it feels more like the're changing it with every number. If you are a very big, very rich software company you can have team A working on version N, while team B works on version N+1. As a guess, the IE8 team is now on IE10.

@lib said: Martin I will have a look at the API you offer , I think it is going to help me in my project. Do keep us posted!

I thought the post was Open Kimono. Boy was I disappointed.

OK, you [almost] got me... Webster's US spelling ideas were to base America's English spellings on the original roots - which he took usually to be Latin - as in ***center/centrum, color/em, labor/em, honor/em etc, instead of centre, colour, labour, honour etc used in Johnson's 'English' English taken via the French... [***actually even 'kentrus' is also a Greek word for a 'spur-point', but became the more usual meaning 'center' when in Latin] So, although some words did originate in Greek, they had long been borrowed into Latin - like Greek's metron/metros which became Latin's meteri/metiri/metrum [both concerning 'measure']... Words like 'metrology' do come from two Greek roots - 'measure' and study' - metron-logos... The word 'meter' for a measuring device is [probably] from the Greek root too... English is also proficient at wrongly combining Greek and Latin roots into single words - e.g. 'Television' [Tele=Far (Greek) + Visio=Sight (Latin)] - which might have been more logical as something like Teletheamation or Videoeminus ??? The French Commission in charge of sorting out their newfangled 'metric' system chose the word 'metre' as the length-unit's name - most say from the Greek root 'metron'>'a measure' - and it is often prefixed with Greek 'number-roots' like deca, kilo, giga, micro, nano etc, but also several Latin rooted ones like deci, centi, milli, micro [Gr&L!] etc, to confuse things completely. Latin's 'metrum' ain't that different anyway and the French did make Latin's 'center/centrum'>'centre' so why not with 'metre'? So I still believe that Webster's spelling of 'meter' for a unit of length was taken from the Latin root 'meter(i)' as it was his preferred root source - albeit perhaps mistakenly, if the French had indeed taken it from Greek as 'metre' ! To quote Webster's Dictionary directly on this: 'Meter' = Old English mēter, from Latin metrum, from Greek metron = measure, meter; Anglo-French metre, from Latin metrum... What's in a name ? ... I used the word 'invent' in invisible 'quotes' - they did 'make' the 'metric' system - by definition it is based on their newfangled 'metres' !

Or did you actually want the new SU 7 version? And you're surprised you had to pay to upgrade?

@thomthom said: @cjthompson said: Sketchup only uses 1.8. 1.8.0 to be exact. Thanks very much - that would certainly make sense!

@jim said: This is how it works. I set the response window 0.07 seconds, so there is almost no lag. Probably a setting of 5 seconds would provide frequent enough updates to allow an abort, and still be nearly as fast as possible. You're using a timer of some sort?

Yes of course thanks. No fun being dumb!

I don't think Lightup does this. I think it renders materials and bakes them into faces in SU. At least that is my (severely limited and naive) understanding.

@chris fullmer said: You would need to create your own tool that draws to the screen. Then it could draw bounding boxes around your components. And you could specify any color you desire. I am out of mental gas for the day, but maybe tomorrow I could try to mock up a quick snippet that would show how its done. Chris Very kind - it's not urgent but I needed to know if it were possible. But of course if you find some time ...

In a normal MSIE browser window, if an error occurs (and you have Internet Options > "Advanced" (tab) > "Browsing" (group) > "Display a notification about every script error" unchecked,) you will not see a Error Popup, but there wil be an error icon in the lower left corner on the Status bar. Clicking this icon will bringup the Error Popup dialog. If you have Visual Studio installed it will likely ask if you wish to Debug in VS.

Actually Martin.. that example was quick and dirty. It CAN be cleaned up. I was thinking it would be better to break out of the iteration when the proper match was found, rather then keep iterating, though how many paths do most people have in their $: anyway? You'd likely run a method and set a constant (perhaps Integer index into $LOAD_PATH) and then use that reference from then onward. So it should be a one time, startup type thangy... One thing I do is actually put set ENV['SUpath']

Most people (who run Su on PC,) already have a copy of Win32API.so where their $LOAD_PATH array can find it, so you should only need to: require 'Win32API' if it's already loaded, require will skip reloading it. You can even get more fancy, by first checking if it's loaded, because it defines the class Win32API, and classnames are constants ie: unless (defined? Win32API)=='constant' %(#F0F0F0)[__]require 'Win32API' end Also.. I think you must unload those DLLs when your plugin is done with them. Perhaps you might need to use a custom AppObserver implementing the onQuit callback, with your plugin.

TIG's method of getting the vertices of a face worked for me. Thanks everyone for the replies.

When Sketchup is run there is no instance of Safari that shows up in the process list. Actually, nothing shows up in the process list other than Sketchup. This indicates that all of the processing is managed within Sketchup itself. Therefore, the sketchup application is linking to frameworks to get its services - rather than launching separate applications. The web framework that Sketchup uses is WebKit. Within the Sketchup bundle there is a WebDialog.framework The WebDialog.framework has the WebKit.h file so I'm assuming it links to the WebKit.framework within the OS I have loaded the nightly build for WebKit and redirected the load path to use the new build. If Sketchup is calling WebKit.framework it should be the one I'm referencing. Its possible that Sketchup is using some kind of "statically linked" instance of webkit but that isn't likely (I hope) The nightly build has a built in Javascript Debugger within the WebInspector but now I need to figure out how to activate it since the Sketchup WebDialogs don't respond to a context click (a right click) like normal Safari windows. I hope I'm on the right track since a JavaScript debugger would be a great help to WebDialog development!

OK, just got Sketchup and the web console installed on my system so I could test this out. Sure enough, making TIG's changes, plus the ones I showed above, and it all works. This is the final code: model = Sketchup.active_model sel = model.selection model.start_operation "mult. pushpull" faces = [] sel.each do |e| faces << e if e.is_a? Sketchup;;Face end faces.each do |face| face.pushpull 100 end model.commit_operation There you go! Let me know how the other tutorials go also!, Chris