@pdonner said: I cannot find the corresponding Win32API and win32ole documentation among these neatly structured pages. Those are part of the standard extended libraries. The Core libraries (modules) are loaded when the Ruby interpreter is loaded. Any non-core library module must be loaded afterward using require(). http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.8.6/

Thanks, Dan. Your advice was very useful. I could have lost a lot of time on the other schemes which I referred to. The 'Programming Ruby' book by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt looks interesting. Downloaded the .so extension modules, installed them and run a Ruby console session: >require 'win32ole' true >ppt = WIN32OLE.new("PowerPoint.Application") #<WIN32OLE;0x11396c58> >ppt.Activate nil That's it: PowerPoint was activated, so I'm ready to use PPT automation in a SU script as desired. Really elegant. This scheme depends on the WIN32OLE extension written by Masaki Suketa. Can anybody give me advice on standard procedures for installation of such extensions on the machines of SU users. My post had another aspect: We are now capable of using Ruby as a client for Windows Automation. What about the other direction. Can SU be extended to become an automation server?

Well, I suppose in a plugin you can easily do things that are just over and beyond us, puny humans...

Hi dedmin. I downloaded and installed Blender. Yes, there is a File > Import > X3D Extensible 3D (.x3d/.wrl) command, but wasn't lucky with my test material. As far as I can see, the command did nothing. There seems to be some kind of conversion script behind the command, but maybe my files are too old?

Found a company, TerraSolid, in our neighborhood which produces programs for processing of this kind of data. Unfortunately their applications cost zillions, so it seems I have to go on with the started project. There is an open source activity at http://liblas.org/ which seems to be very useful. They feature a list of other commercial packages which seem to be based on the os library. The liblas library is based on work done by Martin Isenburg and Jonathan Shewchuk, who are also authors of a set of command line LAS utilities called LAStools at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/, which seems to achieve much of the essential groundwork for our project. Martin's utility "lasclip.exe clips away points falling into polygonal shapes (e.g. complex building footprints)." If the LAS file contains projection information, the las2dem.exe will also "be able to create a KML file that geo-references the DEM for display within Google Earth". The two developers also produced an interesting article "Visualizing LIDAR in Google Earth" http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/googleearth/ [image: rPUJ_P5122C1_detail.png] For a map view of the same area see: http://tinyurl.com/455gcft

Thanks Gaieus for your advice. @gaieus said: Regarding your window colour: go to your material browser > In model, there select the window colour and go to the Edit tab. At the bottom, there is the transparency slider (I would use a less blue glass however). I was ignorant enough to try and edit the stock material, which is apparently attributed read only. The controls were at least disabled. [This item should of course have gone into the newbie forum.]

@wo3dan said: I just made a tangent arc with radius o.2mm by creating a larger one that is "accepted" by SU and then entered the smaller radius in 'Entity Info'. The arc stays tangent but adjusts the radius. That works. I arrived at the same level of 0.0002 m by using your trick... and that's good enough for our purposes. - Thanks for good advice.

Thanks guys for the highly interesting material. I'll follow up all these interesting and hopefully helpful hints. It's nice to see how well this community can respond to various SU-related needs - even in case they are at quite some distance from the main topic.

Odd, I've not seen that. I did finally figure out that the spline is selectable. You haveto select a certain end of it. Just the endpoiint it selectable. Maybe there is a relationship there with the endpoint business. I wonder what weird little quirks there are under the Hood of SU that are sort of forgotten or intenionally left out, but still there in code. There also used to be an "Easter Egg". It is no longer accessible, but apparently the code is still in the software.

@tig said: It's not a 'feature' it's a known 'bug'!..... The Geometry could be just a tiny line 0.1mm long and 'hidden' AND on a layer that is 'off' - the text is still visible...... All true. But the existing geometry, whether visible or not, must be in screen area. Once you rotate the model where the geometry is out of camera sight, the screen text still vanishes. Jean reported this bug (already in SU7, maybe even before) quite some time ago. Wo3Dan

@jean lemire said: However, I made a test and created a group containing a rectangle with a dimensioned side. When I select the group from the outliner, only the dimension shows. The rectangle stays invisible. This is strange and meybe is a bug. That's the behaviour I tried to describe. We run into the problem all the time, because the group containing a dimension is part of the procedure that we developed for our designs. Have a look at the thread Scaling of distorted ground floor layout and you'll understand how we arrived at seeing these weird dimensions.

Thanks TIG. You produced a very nice enhancement of our scheme by offering the TIG two dimension scaling formula that was really missing from our scheme: layout_dimension / model_dimension = scaling_factor To be honest: There are still a couple of fine details that we pay attention to in order to get it all right. We play with the snapping and resolution settings of the Model Info > Units property sheet while setting the guides and moving back to scaling. And yes, it is indeed a good idea to lock the group after successful scaling. TIG's tutorial sheet is excellent. I summarized our findings in Finnish on the web site of the group: http://sites.google.com/site/iivantiira3d/rakennuspiirustuksen-mittakaavan-asettaminen.

Sorry TIG if I couldn't follow your line of thought. I was thinking like this: Assume that the user is drawing with the line tool. That's certainly a situation where drawing axes (and inference colors) are needed. So then the user would like to have an idea of the coordinate system. Have a quick look at 'a-a', then bail out by pushing Es... Eek. Escape also interrupts rubberband drawing. - Just to state an example of a potential conflict. But thanks for your nice contribution that I tried to improve.