Oh gotcha. The Prince IO game works because the user never needs to interact with model directly. All their actions are done through the web dialog and as soon as they click into the model, it must kill their game control then I guess? Chris

@thomthom said: You have a .hta application, you also use that in a Webdialog. You use WebDialog.set_file("myHTA.hta") and window.location.href = "myHTA.htm" ?? Firstly as htas are not compatible with Macs we thought we ought to try and get a WD version working for them. Secondly we know we can launch Sketchup from an hta but we haven't got as far as seeing how to manipulate within it preferably from a single plan/do interface. Anyway thanks again for your help. I thought you deserved some kind of explanation. Regards Chris

Perhaps this is gravedigging but I hae an AHA moment the other day. The reason the offset tool does not work with a single line is that it does not know what 3D plane you want the offset to be on. Two or more non co-linear lines and presto. SU can calculate the plane from any three points. Then determine the side you wish to place the offset on by tranforming the mouse cursor position to the plane. Double sided offset would have the same problem.

Thank you, Miguel. That's the one I ended up using. Thanks for the link to Tomasz' site, too. I've never looked at it before. Pretty cool.

Hello, did you try 2 faces + path ?? the web site http://lss2008.livejournal.com/ Juan974 (reunion island) [image: 2_faces___path.jpg.html?killcode=1352435932519360629] pathface.rb

Sorry about bumping my own thread, but I'd really like to solve this one. The built-in rectangle tool does exactly what I want. You can see it by watching the VCB. Even though you are at a diagonal distance from the the first point, it snaps to even numbers in the cartesian directions. I started with the line tool sample, but I modifed the VCB code to display the x and y offset values rather than the striaght-line length. But they are always some odd value with a ~. CB.

Thanks Tig. My tools are specific to a very specialized group of users (timber framers), so they'll know what should be selected. I think having the tool grayed out on the menu is all I need to do. CB.

Yes, I was worried about this problem. In my woodwrk.rb I use a simple math evaluator as an alternate to simply a math expression. I parse the string and where there are legitimate length fields I insert the following: s.to_l.to_f.to_s. If fear this won't work in European countries although I do know at least one guy using my Ruby.

I discussed this with Jim just now and we decided that it is better to include the full methods output for the beta version so interested parties can understand and improve the code holistically. But thanks for your help. Sometimes I'm a little too quick off the mark! Chris

Thanks again

Thank you very much! I think that just solved a question I had about why some of my scripts dont have pictures for their toolbars. I'm getting alot of load errors as well. I think I will have to delete those scripts and make sure I copy them into the plugins folder in the correct directory order. I will watch some tutorials too. Thanks

thanks for your help on this guys, the right click option that you made honolulu doesn't seem to work on my computer but Chris, your updated code works so thank you very much

Ok. I didn't know.. I thought it was native. Is there some way to stash this inside my script so that the method is local? Or perhaps I shouldn't worry about that? (How do I check if a method is defined? If I can't, are duplicates OK?)

Darn, I finished coding only to discover the "putdxf" I use for my CAD import has a bug that fails to locate multiple blocks correctly. I confirmed this by being unable to "putdxf" with the system's "getdxf". Will have to rewrite as a "command line" script. Thanks for everything, sorry I couldn't understand much of what you tried to explain to me. But, because of your help, I will get better in time

@thomthom said: I think that as a component/group is opened for editing, all co-ordinates are made global. That explains much. @thomthom said: Su7.0 introduced a method to help on this matter: http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/model.html#edit_transform And I'll have to transform them all back myself, I guess. Thanks, Thomas.

Cheers guys, that makes sense

I guess I would recommend using it without the do, since ruby syntaxd seems to think its redundant (which I do find odd as it does not fit their other loop syntaxes). Or if it helps, I learned the array.each do |e| ... endmethod first and I was able to understand it fairly quickly. And I hve zero programming experience outside of Ruby for Sketchup. Another bonus to teaching that method is that all the API uses it, as apposed to the for in end loop. So it might help readers transition into the API smoother. But that is just a thought, Chris

@thomthom said: Doh! I never noticed that method! Nor is_curve? or single_object?. I know. I searched the SCF first, but never thought to try to search the Ruby documentation. (I kind of assume that if something is important we have discussed it here already.) Actually their search works pretty well. (even better than that) if you go to: http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/index.html And use their search box for something like "Curve" it displays text from and links to pages in the SketchUp documentation containing the word curve. (Just what you might expect it to - but I also suspected that it might search the whole universe for the word curve) I need to use it more often.

Interesting, I did it manually with no problems. Perhaps this is yet again coming back to SU tolerance issues? Chris

@daiku said: Clearly I was overthinking it! Thanks, Thomas. Something none of us have ever been guilty of before Chris