Launch Sketchup from inside AOO/LO Draw or Writer?

vojo

Has anybody explored any sort of bridge between Open Office or Libre Office? The idea would be to be able to have a drawing or document in OO/LO where you click on it and it launches sketchup to edit the actual drawing....then when complete, takes the resulting drawing and places it where the original was.

Much like Visio and Word / PPT where from drawing in word / PPT you can launch visio, make changes and return to word / PPT and the drawing is updated.

Aerilius

This is called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and is a non-standardized technology from Microsoft. As far as I know, LibreOffice has to some extent support for it, but SketchUp would need to support being embedded. If you try in LibreOffice Insert → Object → OLE object it will tell you that skp files cannot be embedded.

However, you could insert a 2d image that was exported from SketchUp. You can set the inserted image to be just "linked" and it will update immediately every time when the external image file is changed (you have to make sure the linked file is always available, until you break all links). This would fullfill the first requirement to automatically update the image. While you can use the context menu to open the image in an image editor, it is more challenging to make it open the skp model in SketchUp. I tried setting a hyperlink on the image object to file:///path/to/SketchUp.exe /path/to/model.skp but it didn't work.
It would be probably better to write a LibreOffice (or OpenOffice or MS Office) macro for that.

I think the SketchUp team would rather try to advertize its LayOut for this purpose instead of investing any resources into this.

vojo

RE OLE....I know about OLE but its hap hazard in AOO/LO....problematic

RE embed picture....Yes...do that now all the time...very manual...doesnt lend well to update
and managing versions.

Since AOO/LO draw is not much more than impress (abstract shapes, simple diagrams, 2D) just curious if anybody was looking to take the productivity package to the next level.

AOO/LO filters for Visio are real weak...so that is not an option. Could look at
inkscape,etc...but those seem to be more about making logos and icons. Could look at
vpython since there is a python bridge but vpython is really used for scientific
visualization (relatevely crude colors and shapes, no real library of shapes to build off of, etc).

so just curious.