Ghost icons

pier70

I have installed two plug in fur en and bubble and skin but on the tool bar I can see that the plug in is on but don't appear the single drawing on the icon, but only a rectangle space of the icon, why? thank u for your reply

TIG

You haven't installed ALL of the required files properly.
If a tool's button icons are missing it means that the expected image file hasn't been found...
For example fur_en icons' image files should be here, in its subfolder:
C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Plugins\fur_en
and in that there are six PNG files:
e.g. fur_ci24.png
...
Double check the downloaded zip file for each tool, and ensure that all of the needed files are in the right places...

pier70

Thank u TIG, I was installing bubble and skin into the plug in folder, when it require tools folder. But, why some plug in go into the plug in folder and others like bubble and skin into the tools, I don't know the difference between plug in and tools i think....

TIG

The only files that belong in the Tools folder are the ones that ship with SketchUp itself, or are given as extra tools by SketchUp.
ALL other files should go into the Plugins folder, or into that script's subfolder, which itself goes into the Plugins folder.
The basic [current] setup is that SketchUp auto-loads all .rb/.rbs files in the Plugins folder and then those in the Tools folder. It uses a system global-variable called $LOAD_PATH which is an array of the paths to be used for auto-loading. There are some special scripts that add new folder paths to this, this means that you can then auto-load files from elsewhere. Ruby can 'load' scripts from anywhere: if you just give the file name it looks in the folders in $LOAD_PATH, if you give a full path name it loads that specific file.

Because of this it's a good idea for authors to add flexibility into there file/folder 'path' coding, so that the subfolder of support files only needs to be located with the auto-loading .rb file for these other files to be found with it and also loaded in code.

Some older scripts mistakenly say to install into the Tools folder.
Unless they are specifically hard-coded to expect to be in Tools using them all within Plugins as outlined above should also work...
This tool's author is mistaken in his recommendations.
Putting the script into the Plugins folder [keeping files within the script's subfolder etc] should work fine, and obeys the basic principles used by every other author around.

I have the 'loader' ' SoapSkinBubbleTools.rb' in my Plugins folder - and its subfolder of files in there too.It loads just fine as an Extension, and once activated its toolbar can be activated successfully too...