How to align all components axis to world axis

IADDIC

sdmitch: I hope you understand what TIG is suggesting. For me, it is becoming more and more obvious I will need to learn Ruby...So far I've 6 months getting into the depths of Sketchup and Layout...It is becoming obvious that those who fair the best (in getting the application to do what they need) know Ruby.

TIG

The native context-menu item 'Change Axes' lets you reset the axes of a selected Component - e.g. so they then align with a skewed beam's sides etc.
This doesn't work on Groups, but you could first use the context-menu 'Make Component' on the Group before resetting its axes...
To revert it back into a Group think about making it into a component, then sorting out that component's axes, then editing its contents, selecting-all and 'Make Group'; finally you exit that edit and explode the component, the resultant no longer nested Group will retain reset axes matching the temporary component container...

IADDIC

TIG: I have been doing something similar on a component by component basis. The problem is some of my models have 100's of these skewed objects (the example I show is small). Hence, sdmitch has been looking to help solve the problem in mass. The need for doing so is driven by that fact the skewed objects must be detailed in Layout and can not be done so accurately while they are skewed.

So the thought was simple...the solution less so.

1.) reset the axis
2.) de-skew
3.) use the Plugin Parts-->Scene
4.) Detail in Layout

Step 1 and 2 were taking forever doing them manually so I asked for help in
1.) Asking if I first understood my problem
2.) Seeking alternative existing solutions
3.) finding help in developing a solution for the problem in scale.

Seems like sdmitch has a 95% solution. As you can see from his posts, most of the objects are de-skewed with the script he is working on except for nested ones. This is huge and if he solves the last piece it is monumental for me personally. If I had just a few items to contend with I would use the native menu driven solutions. That works fine...but when many model with many items are in this condition the problem is, well...difficult.