I've been looking at this problem a lot lately. I have found
that having a "Modified Active Style" in the list of Styles is
a very bad situation when using LO. The reason is, "Modified Active Style"
will constantly change or not exist at all, so LO will not render
the same style every time you save your SU model.
The best practice is to make sure you don't have a "Modified Active Style"
by looking at the Styles Inspector in SU (it will show some
circular arrows) before you save and update in LO.
I've been suggesting to people to just create a new dummy Scene that
uses a Style that doesn't exist in any other Scene. If you switch
to that Scene every time before you save, the "Modified Active Style"
will get wiped out automatically. (Notice how easy it is to make the
"Modified Active Style" disappear?)

Can you give some examples of what you script so we can get some ideas of what to add to a scripting interface?

I also didn't have a problem exporting to high quality.
I have seen problems when you try to change the default
pdf file name (don't know why). Just take all the defaults-
don't change the suggested filename and see if that works.

@viewrick said:

Well it took a total of 10 minutes to update reference. This is a show stopper for me if I have to wait 10 minutes in between reference updates. I'd rather export each scene as JPG/PDF and build my presentation in InDesign.

My guess its the vector rendering that is taking all the time.

I would suggest turning off auto-rendering by unchecking the
Auto checkbox in the SU Inspector and just rendering the images
you need at the moment by clicking the render button and then
render the whole document when you actually need all the images.
To render the whole doc turn on Auto rendering.

Regarding 6 pages with 2-5 windows on each page-
i.e. exporting 12-30 jpgs from SU and importing into InDesign,
you can do that by hand in less than 10 minutes each time you
make a change in SU? How often do you update every single one of
your images in InDesign? How are you getting vector models into
InDesign in less than 10 minutes?

For text I would try setting the point size in SU.
Then turn on vector rendering which will create real
text characters, not bitmap rendered chars. There's
a bug in SU where it renders text at a hard-coded 72
dpi, but you may be running 96 or 120 dpi on Windows,
so the text size isn't correct, but it will be correct
when rendered as vector in LO.

Also, paulside suggests selecting the Scene while
the model is in edit mode. This has a slight problem
in that when you exit the edit mode the Scene will be
marked with (Modified) in the SU inspector. This will
break the LO/SU model connection if you update the Scene
in SU. To prevent that, just select the SU model (don't
go into edit mode) and just select the Scene in the SU
Inspector (it won't get marked as modified).

I wouldn't worry about sending a Scene to LO, I always
just insert the skp into LO and then select the Scene
in the SU Inspector.

Let me know if this doesn't help-
http://groups.google.com/group/LayOut-Group/browse_thread/thread/1b4420a618d5016a/9e922f9407438831?hl=en#9e922f9407438831
If it doesn't, then you may want to send me your doc to see
if I can figure out what's going on.

What version of LayOut are you using?
What OS are you running?

@thomthom said:

So after creating the threads, you have to start a loop that runs until your threads complete? And that means you can't do anything else in SU while the threads execute?

That's what I found, but this solution wouldn't work for me because I needed the thread to always run.

I have tried threads from a Ruby script in SU and found that the thread only gets executed when other Ruby commands are executed. Create your thread and then run some other Ruby commands (like a loop that prints out stuff) and you'll see that your thread will actually get executed. I don't think Ruby is actually creating a real thread, its just handling the time slices itself- which means you have to be giving the Ruby interpreter CPU time to do its business.

Can you post a screen shot?
Can you trim the file down to just one component and post that
so we can take a look at it?

Can you post a LO doc so we can debug the problems?
Thanks,
Jeff

There are no icons/bitmaps for those commands.
While you're adding the new buttons to the toolbar
right click on them and select "Edit Button Image..."

Create Scenes in SU and select them in LO.

Probably not the problem... also check out-
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=14519

Can you post the LO doc to reproduce this? We would like to test it.
The rendering should look the same between LO and SU (minus AA because LO
doesn't AA).

The problem most likely deals with your Styles not being saved.
It boils down to, if you open the Styles Inspector in SU and you
see a circular arrow in the style preview, it most likely won't
display correctly in LO. You have to make sure you save new Styles
when you select your Scene(s) in SU, so you don't see the circular
arrow showing up in the Style thumbnail. One way to get around this
problem is to be using least 2 Styles in your Scenes.
What I mean there is, "Scene 1" should have one style and some other Scene
should have a different style. I would create a bogus Scene with some style
you know you won't ever use. Then to make sure what you are going to get in LO,
switch to the bogus Scene in SU, then switch back to the Scene you want in LO.
This will wipe out the circular arrow in the Styles editor.

After all that.... were/are you just using one Style and seeing a circular arrow?

Plus, there's currently a bug where you change the Style on a Scene in SU and
LO won't reflect that change. This will be fixed in LO2 M1.

See also-
http://groups.google.com/group/LayOut-Group/browse_thread/thread/df18c0fb4ec34235?hl=en#

@agrazdi said:

Gaieus
But with others like arrows, they don't, any idea why the difference ?
agrazdi

The difference is, the arrows are actually Sketchup models. I think
they come in as vector renderings, so you would have to right click on them
to explode them into LO entities and then you can color them.
You might be able to create your own arrows with different colors by
editing the SU model and changing the edge color.

@agrazdi said:

Can you give us more details and tips of how this Vector rendering subjetc works, and what advantages can we get from using it ?

Using a vector rendering also generates page size independent output. So the size of
an exported PDF will be the same no matter what size the page is. The line quality will
also stay the same no matter the page size.

In the SU dialog/inspector inside the View tab there's a checkbox
that says "Preserve Scale on Resize", try that.
With it unchecked it behaves like SU when its main app window is resized.

SU is CPU bound, so the speed of the CPU is most important.