A DC tech reference would be pretty awesome. Thanks! -- Karen

Didier - thanks for posting this. For my current purposes, I sometimes have another face bounded by the inner loops that I don't want to erase, so If I copy a bunch of faces together, and copy the inner loop faces first, then they'll get deleted when I copy the outer faces. So, creating a group, copying the group, and immediately exploding the original group is the best method for me. Dan - thanks for the info on face.clone and face.dup. I saw <Deleted Entity: xxxxxxxxx> pop up in the ruby console, but I just assumed that the face was immediately deleted because it was placed on top of the other face. -- Karen

Cool. Thanks.

I agree. I tried to use the linetool to learn how to make a tool, as the API suggests. I got so confused. It is a pretty complex tool, at least more complex than it should be if it is being pointed to as a good script for beginners to learn from. Chris

I've found the EntitiesObserer to be bugged... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=20676

@unknownuser said: activate the plugin which immediately groups the selection then switches to the move tool.. upon moving/placing the newly created group, it explodes? Yes - by using the ToolsObserver http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/toolsobserver.html you can detect Tool activity. Though you need to find out what state in the tool to look for.

Sweet! Thanks for the help. I'll give it a try. -- Karen

Hi Karen. I generate timber frame shop drawings with Layout quite extensively. What follows is my work flow; which I have developed with a bunch of trial and error. The key move is to make a separate SU file for each part of your system; great room, Master Bedroom, etc. I use this new file for my Layout work. I isolate each part of the frame that I want to dimension and I move them around in model space until I can dimension them and place them in Layout without seeing any extraneous members. I do all of my dimensioning in SU, particularly with timber frames because you have so many instances where faces aren't flush and you have to rotate the model to get the point you need, which is a royal pain in Layout. Once I have my new SU file, with everything dimensioned, then I can insert it into Layout and then navigate, in each viewport, to the view I want. I don't use scenes in SU, though this would make things easier, becaue I experience a weird and annoying glitch with SU where, when I hit my middle mouse button to navigate, it jumps to a scene. This makes it impossible for me to "work" a model with scenes, so I have figured out work arounds. So, the new SU file, when complete, is a mess of dimensions, and pieces all over the place, but everything far enough apart from each other to not interfere with my views in Layout. In your particular case, I would isolate the bent and dimension (at scale), I would isolate each timber in the bent, and give dimensions (not to scale as I display timbers isometrically), and I would have a scale plan view, with necessary walls, etc. Hope this helps.