Well, it wouldn't have 'been clear in the morning' without your clarification, Jim, but it now is - THANKS. I now see that although the Class CylTool is defined, the function to create the tool is NOT 'def'ined. So my slightly modified code now works to provide Draw menu entries for 'Construction line' and 'Cylinder - on axis' with the addition of just these lines at the end of the linetool.rb script where only the first four lines were originally. These functions provide shortcuts for selecting the new tools def linetool Sketchup.active_model.select_tool LineTool.new end def cyltool Sketchup.active_model.select_tool CylTool.new end Add tools to Draw menu if( not file_loaded?("linetool.rb") ) UI.menu("Draw").add_item("Construction line") { linetool } UI.menu("Draw").add_item("Cylinder - on axis") { cyltool } end file_loaded("linetool.rb") I now just want to add a few refinements, which I can see how to do (following the excellent examples elsewhere in this forum and in the script repositories), to: specify the radius or diameter of the cylinder make the drawn cylinder into a group or component automatically design PNG graphics to indicate which tool is in use, instead of the generic white arrow. Thanks again for such a prompt and helpful response - much appreciated. John McC

Dave, I do believe that's the one I'm looking for. You don't know how much time you've just saved me. Many many thanks Grant

Yes, I've studied it extensively... But what I didn't noticed before is that when you have a component within another component and when you paint this sub-component globally (by default) you thus modify its definition. That's to say you can't have this sub-component colored with 2 different colors in to separate "parents". I hope that I'm clear, anyway this makes my job a lot easier I must extract an Excel sheet with a global list of top-level furniture components (kitchen cabinets, shelves...), and a detailed list of the components of level 1 whith their colors/materials, themselves made of various pieces of level 2 of various colors/materials. Pfff, furniture manufacturers are complicated people sometimes... P.S. Typo: Bonne chance (thanks)

I did upload the correct file... BUT the weirdness of Vista is that it segregates 'compatibility files' when they're inside the Programs Files Folder. I based RandomSelect on RandomDelete. I copied it, renamed it and changed its contents - and when I used it it read the right one and runs fine !!! BUT for some stupid reason Vista uploads the initial unedited copy - although it has the right 'name'... After some efforts I have fixed it and I have now corrected the error in the Depository... http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?p=44671#p44671 The old version needs deleting but I can't do it since after a day or so the posts seem to be locked... Can a Mod please fix. EDIT: As of this edit the wrong file/post is gone. Anyone who downloaded the duff version (~24 ?) please accept my apologies, and go and get the corrected one... More haste, less speed...

I think it removes unused lines from the faces in the current selection.

TBD, any posibility to let sub.exe use stdin and stdout, instead of needing to save an intermediate file?

Hi, D/L TIG's Componentsreporter+ script, there are some good tricks in there

@rubine said: do you see a chance to rebuild the "create component" with ruby? i.e. writing your own "create component" method (creating a ComponentDefinition) You can easily make and place components with ruby methods, such as. Definitionlist.add("componentdefinitionname") ComponentDefinition.entities Group.entities Group.to_component entities have lots of 'add' methods: http://download.sketchup.com/sketchuphelp/gsu6_ruby/Docs/Ruby-Entities.html#add_instance You can't 'save_as' components in current Ruby - but you can do it manually. I've discovered that in the SDK there's a kind of ...Group.SaveAs() method that would allow us to write something like a dll or a socket that could then access that function. In a script you'd have to say something like: require 'GroupExporter.so' ... GroupExporter.new(group,filepath) ... This would then save a specified group to a .skp file at a specified name/location. These kinds of variables can be got/set in earlier bits of Ruby coding... To get it to export a Component all we'd need to do is make a temporary group, that's then named after the component-definition and even with a copy of its description if any (that way the final exporter component matches the original in the model...). Then to that group's entities we add an instance of the component (and explode it inside the group?). We then use GroupExporter.new(group,filepath) and finally erase the group to tidy up. If we want it done 'silently' we can specify the filepath - say as the model's folder_path/group_name.skp - or we could prompt for a component name and/or location... All I need now is someone who can make this dll/so with the SDK - my C++ is too poor to do it...

Thank you. That worked. Cheers, Dave

Thanks Dave, that's the one! I've just bought it! Thanks to TBD as well!

Thanks TIG, I'll apply your suggestions and evaluate the results. Greg

if my hierarchy of components has 3 levels, is it possible to get the hierarchy of all the components (so that one can see of which components one component consists)?

is there also a possibility to store components automatically in a folder (as an .skp file)?

Useful link for the more advanced. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/EM/ExtrudeAlongPath.rb ? Not exactly but...

Working OK at the moment - images attached. Bob [image: p2mR_ScreenHunter_01_resize.jpg] [image: SPjD_ScreenHunter_02_resize.jpg]

The thing with a Bounding Box is - it's virtual. You don't have to have any geometry to create and populate a bounding box.

@jim said: I agree about needing to read or write on the disk in order to accomplish this; however... if you are going to be reading and writing files, why not copy the .skm, load it, and make the adjustments? Either way, it looks as if the best you are going to do is a clunky work-around. Well, this is to create programmatically a semi-transparent material from an existing material. This is the only way to build a macro that would show part of the model in Xray (as the View mode of Sketchup applies to the whole model). At the moment, I can do it with color of material, but cannot get the textures to be Xray'ed. See discussion thread in the forum at http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=6638 and also in the French section (http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=6589&start=0) [image: 0DFA_xrayhousepartial.jpg]

Yep, that's it ! @unknownuser said: the reason it fails, it because it is looking for: "=", and this line has: " = " Thanks Al. I was thinking that the strip method didn't care of spaces, and it does in fact. Since components.strings is the stock file that is installed with the french package of GSU: to SU Team

@unknownuser said: because WebDialogs are not using the default browser installed on the user machine, but instead a Internet Explorer shell (the same that you see when viewing .chm files for example) on Windows version. there is no option to use other browser engine for displaying WebDialogs. btw, why do you need another one ? Just another point on this issue since this was the only thread I could find that was related somewhat to my problem. I was using the get models button to access 3d warehouse for the longest time, no prob. Then one day the model images would not appear in the popup browser and I couldn't download them to my sketchup model. I tried restarting SU, rebooting the computer and eating some chicken soup...all to no avail. Since I use FF as my default browser I assumed that SU was using it in some weird form as the get model popup. I now know that it uses IE, and was able to solve the problem by locating my deleted version of IE and purging all the cookies and caches. Too bad we can't choose to have FF used as the default dialog. Would be less confusing in certain instances. cheers...