Hi,

I have been looking at the Excel table into LO thing (or lack of in the PC version). Here is my offering:

Create your table in Excel with cell widths, heights, font size and formulas. Make sure that any editable data can be copied and pasted as a block (for convenience).
Format a matching area in the spreadsheet as a swap area.
Select the entire table, copy and paste into LO. The table comes in as an editable text block with cells bordered in black lines.
Make any changes to data in individual cells. Note, no formulas are copied just the numbers.
Double click in the text box which will select all cell data.
Copy and then paste back into the Excel sheet but in the formatted swap area.
Select the data to be changed and paste into the original table position.
The formula results will update.
Start back at the beginning! Re-copy the updated table and double click in the LO text box, paste.

Not perfect but seems to work. Basically it is a way of re-calculating a table using Excel and not having to do it manually.

Brian

Not that I know of (and ruby isn't yet(?) implemented in layout)

You could however assign it to a keystroke.
(which IMO is even better than an icon shortcut)

…and just to include us Maconauts, the Character Viewer and Keyboard Viewer apps can be added to the menubar from the SystemPreferences|Keyboard pane - tick the 'Show Keyboard & Character viewer in menubar' checkbox.

You can get all sorts of interesting characters.

Ever head of the 'Z notation schema composition' symbol? - ⨟ - Nor me.
Asterism - ⁂
Degree - °
Plusminus - ±
Diameter - ⌀
Blank symbol - ␢ (but it's not blank!)

Here is what I think you mean:
Can you use sketchup layers with 2D entities like you do in photoshop? Not exactly, but you can approximate this, and it doesn't necessarily require Layers Manager, unless you want to independently control the visibility
Example

import 2 2D images into your Sketchup drawing assign each to a different layer, like Layer0 and Layer1. assuming you're viewing from the top, select the 2D entity you want on top, then Select move that entity up the blue axis so it is physically on top of the "lower" 2D entity. Now you can control visibility of each image entity with layer manager.

CCK

@unknownuser said:

Right click on the roof plane and choose "Align View".
Right click on the roof plane and choose "Align View".
Right click on the roof plane and choose "Align View".
Right click on the roof plane and choose "Align View".
Right click on the roof plane and choose "Align View".
💚

Good one 😛

Dave. Oops.... 😳
Didn't noticed you answered before. You were faster typing, because I'm sure your post wasn't there when I wrote mine.

hmm.

i don't think you're going to be able to accomplish this with dynamic components..

i'm not quite sure how the jumpers are supposed to look when filling the awkward shaped roofs but i assume they will be cut on angles.(?)
basically, if you can't use standard sketchup's Scale,Move, & Rotate ( , , ) tools to modify the components then you can't do it with DCs..

(there are workarounds such as shown in this stair building dc of mine.. i made the video to show the suTeam some requests of mine but you'll probably be able to see the limitations you're up against here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QYs1lcrAck )

so, try taking one of your jumper components and using only the tools i mentioned earlier, conform it to your desired shape.. is it possible?

also, with DCs, you can't just click on one of the odd surfaces then have the components populate the area automagically.. you'd have to enter all the parameters manually via a component dialog which would be easy enough to do with the rectangle shape but once you get into the varying angles/cuts/etc, you're going to hit a dead end..

this would be more suited to ruby and there are people on these forums that could (probably) make a plugin for you but, it's so specialized of a plugin that i don't think they're just going to make it and publish here as nobody but you needs it.. it seems like a situation for contracting one of the writers to build the plugin specifically suited to your needs.. if this is for your business, i'd say it's a route you may want to explore as it's going to save you tons of time over drawing these things manually per each roof.. i don't know how much they'd charge to do something like this but if it were me, i'd be expecting something in the $100-$500 range(?)