John McClenahan and Steve Baumgartner are pleased to issue the initial beta version of a major revision of Steve's Angular Dimension extension. This new version is currently available on the sketchUcation plugin store.

We have labeled it "beta" because we have only a limited suite of systems to test on ourselves and have found a few issues with particular combinations of OS, SketchUp version, and IE version and settings. We need additional people to try it and report whether it works for them.

@lotus222 said:

"Tip: Is the Add License area grayed out and inaccessible? This means you have installed SketchUp Make instead of the SketchUp Pro trial. If having two versions of SketchUp on your computer might be causing problems, try uninstalling SketchUp and then installing only the version you need."

To clarify, that message refers to having both Make and Pro installed for the same SketchUp version, e.g. 2016. It does not refer to having 2015 and 2016 both installed. Each 'year-version' of SketchUp installs completely independently of all the others, including the license file, and you can have multiples ones installed and running at the same time.

Um., isn't dropbox sync via the network? The latency in that operation may be what is triggering the error message.

Seems possible there could be something involving Groups or Components going on - but we'd need to see the file to check it out.

@fredo6 said:

I see the issue with the MDI approach (so toolbar must be independent of model window), but I don't understand why the Sketchup team did not address some of the basic issues, such as the icons for New, Open, Save, as well as the size of icons in the main toolbar, the text size in most inspectors. After all, there seems to be many Mac users around, including Pro users.

Fredo

We Mac users often wonder about the same things (and more). It seems that the Mac GUI has gotten very little attention compared to Windows and things like my.sketchup, starting all the way back when Google bought SketchUp and continuing through Trimble's ownership.

Some aspects of how the SU toolbars (aka "palettes") work on Mac are because SU on Mac is multi-document-interface (MDI) whereas the Windows version is SDI. Since multiple model windows can be open simultaneously in the same Mac SketchUp session, only the top-stripe toolbar is associated with a particular model window. The others all float free (they belong to the app rather than to any window). Equally important, they are not forced to the "top" of the viewing stack; they can overlay or be overlain by other things including the model window, inspector windows, and other toolbars.

So, yes, it is more challenging to set up your screen on Mac to avoid issues with the toolbars. The MDI aspect is a Mac thing, as are other basic Mac vs Windows notions of how a GUI should work (e.g. the single app menu at the top of the screen). But a lot of the SU problems are programming choices made long ago that Trimble seems reluctant to change (in contrast to the Windows version, whose toolbar system has changed several times). Most of us Mac SU users have given up griping about the difficulties and differences since nothing ever changes; we get used to coping with it as is.

As to your specifics:

• So far as I know, "New", "Open" and "Save" are not included on any standard Mac toolbar. I have no idea why not, but they simply aren't there and aren't available to add to the top-stripe. Other than the top-stripe toolbar, SU on Mac does not even support creating or customizing your own toolbars (one could do it via Ruby code, but that's a different question). I frequently envy the gurus using Windows SU who can show a small custom toolbar with just the relevant tools when creating an animation to illustrate a procedure.

• At least on my Mac, the "Use large toolbar buttons" setting affects only the free-floating toolbars, not the top-stripe, and it makes them unacceptably large. However, this may vary with the specific model of Mac and screen resolution.

• The available "snap" behaviors of the toolbars on Mac are very limited. They will snap individually to the right or left edges of the screen, but not to the top and bottom edges. They also won't snap to each other in any direction and don't recognize the edges of the model window in any way. Combined with the inability to keep them reliably "on top", this means you have to carefully manage where the toolbars, model windows and inspector windows are placed else things will obscure each other. As Dave says, you may spend more effort toggling them on and off to maximize visibility of the model window.

Some of these gripes are reduced if you have a giant high-dpi screen (hence lots of real estate) or dual monitors. But many of them are just facts of life.

Your first clue as to whether you have created a solid is to look at what the Entity Info window displays when you select the object. EI will say it is solid if you have followed the rules correctly. If it says you have selected some number of entities, then you have missed the first rule, which is that a SU solid must be a single Group or Component. If it says you have selected a Group or Component but doesn't say "solid" you have some flaw in the geometry. From what you describe, you are likely violating the "single Group or Component" rule.

TT's solid inspector 2 is a tool for analyzing and in some cases fixing such flaws, but it can't turn multiple Groups into one.

There are numerous posts on this and the Sketchup.com forum about creating solids and correcting errors. Do a search, read a few of them and you should have a much clearer understanding of what's wrong in your case.

If you do that and are still stuck, upload your model so folks here can look at it and give specific comments.

Did you perhaps mean CutList 4.1 (the latest version)? But no matter with respect to your question.

The simplest way to do what you want is probably to tell CutList to save a CSV file and edit that file in a spreadsheet program. CutList does not have configuration for ordering of columns or for suppressing units in the output. CutList is distributed as unencrypted Ruby source, but it is sufficiently complex that I wouldn't suggest you try to modify it if you are not reasonably experienced with Ruby.

I know what the word means, but that doesn't clarify what the OP wants with respect to SketchUp. A text description of the steps to create a model? For what kind of "project work"? And why 6-line?

Could you expand on what you mean by "schemas"? I'm not familiar with that as a SketchUp term.

I agree with Juju: with every component exploded, there should be nothing to list in the component browser and the response should be snappy - unless you are trying to browse a large collection, not the in-model collection. In the latter case it may still be so large as to bog down the browser, or a slow/lagging network connection can affect it.

@bryan k said:

I'm still hoping they make a version for Linux. As Apple is now Unix based and there is an Apple version, I would hope a Linux version will be offered one day.

This has been discussed frequently on the sketchup.com forum. Although Mac OS X is a UNIX variant, the GUI is proprietary to Apple and is very different from anything available on Linux. It would take a significant amount of effort to port the Mac version to Linux.

How many components are in the model or the collection you are viewing? I've seen the components window freeze SketchUp (spinning beachball of death) while generating the thumbnails for a large list of components. If I wait long enough, it eventually wakes up. Having a lot of unused components in the model aggravates this problem.

I think it may be due to proprietary elements in the DXF file. Here is what I see when I open it with eDrawings:

Disable/enable inference snaps has been requested many times but not implemented. All one can do is keep submitting the feature requests. If there are enough requests for something it will eventually rise in priority but otherwise Trimble will leave it on their "maybe someday" list.

Sorry, I can't understand from your post quite what is the problem. Is the image intended to show the "some kind of clipping"? If so, I don't see it. If not, maybe you could post an image that does show it? The arrow on your image points to an edge. Without seeing the model, I can't tell you why this edge is visible or what will happen if you erase it - quite possibly there is a small misalignment.

Ah yes, many other modeling systems are based on triangular faces. I hadn't realized you need to export the SketchUp model to one of them. However, to prevent your bottom face from being over-triangulated you will need to isolate it from the rest using Groups or Components. Otherwise where the walls touch the floor will break up the floor even if you draw the line across the gap, and the export will therefore cover it with a bunch of smaller triangles.

Especially if they have small parts, it is possible that the lights are causing SketchUp's cleanup operation to merge nearby vertices and thereby lose small edges and the faces they would bound. That can potentially cause errors that SketchUp tries to fix. Losing the ceiling indicates that some part of the fix caused that face to be discarded, possibly because "fixed" points are no longer coplanar.

You are right that the fix log was written by Trimble programmers for use by Trimble programmers. It describes what it finds by reference to internal C++ objects that have no meaning to the user, and it does not show you what caused it to deem your model to have issues. I regard the log as pretty close to useless and wonder why they bother to display it.

I'm a little confused by your question. A polygon in SketchUp can have any planar shape, it does not need to be triangular. Your six-edge figure will be a single polygon unless it is not planar, and if it is not planar drawing the interior line won't make it so.

A "surface border" is a loop of edges that create a hole from the exterior to the interior of the object. A SketchUp solid must be an air-tight surface enclosing a volume. It can't be air-tight with a hole! Such holes also create a place where the model has an infinitely thin surface exposed, which is a mathematical abstraction that can't exist in reality. The reason Solid Inspector doesn't fix these is that it can't guess your intent. The fix requires somehow closing up the hole, but there are almost always multiple ways to do so. So, click the surface borders part of the SI window to see what it highlights and then draw additional geometry as needed to close the hole.

"Internal face edges" means pretty much what it says. There are faces with edges protruding into the interior of the object. SI can often fix these, so try clicking the "fix all" button and see what happens.