I am getting into Layout to teach my students technical drawing. Unfortunately the method I want to use doesn't seem to work. Basically create something in SketchUp and take it into LayOut to create views. Set the views to Isometric, Ortho (AKA parallel projection, Full Scale, and print. If you put a ruler on these things they aren't the right size. In a top/front/right view they're correct, but in isometric the distances are not what the dimensions suggest. This is also true for other scales.

This can be seen in the screen shot--The object is 5" long along its lower edge. The red line is 5" long and is in paper space and is clearly not the same size. The view is set to Full Scale 1:1. Other scales have the same issue.

Can anybody tell me what is going on here, and how to fix it? It doesn't seem like a bug per se.

Thanks, Sam

Hi everybody. I teach Technical Drawing at the high school level. I use SketchUp a lot (in addition to AutoCAD, Inventor, etc) and my students love it. Recently I've gotten into SketchyPhysics and hopefully I'll be able to spend part of the coming weekend preparing some tutorials and videos for my students to use in learning it. When these are done I'll put them out for general use. Documentation on SketchyPhysics seems, well, sketchy. I have a lot of respect for community-driven projects but most of serves best to assist those of us who like to spend a weekend figuring out CAD software and that ain't your typical 9th grader. I have a couple of questions you guys may be able to help me with, for example:

1. It seems like when connecting a joint to a group you can only use the keyboards left-hand CTRL button, not the right. Is this happening to anybody else?
2. Is there a way to set the scale of things like the joint icons? They're like six inches wide by default. When I make little moving machines (see below) I have to scale them down or they overwhelm the model.
3. Gears (joints affecting other joints) doesn't work for me. A motor in a group with another group doesn't seem to do anything, although they can affect groups outside their own, and doing it outside groups doesn't do anything. Can I get a breakdown on the right way? Should I be doing something in the UI?
4. What do these parameters represent? Are they completely random or are they in any real world unit of resistance, density, acceleration, and so on?
5. Often I create a model that crashes SketchUp and then I try to go back and eliminate any possible cause (deleting joints, moving groups away from each other, etc) and it won't stop crashing. If I start over sometimes new files crash too and then eventually the original file starts working again. It seems like some sort of internal data is being carried over and causing the crashes and I'm wondering if there's a way to flush this.
   Thanks for your help!