Years ago (76 I think) I was at the Farnborough Air Show watching the big show; Harriers dancing in the sky, the Red Arrows, booth babes etc. Then a specially prepared USAF F15 rolled out to show off how fast it could climb. No armaments, minimal fuel load , that sort of thing. He made a fast run, lifted a few feet off the deck, rotated to near vertical and barely missed crunching his tail, aimed at the stars and WHAM! Birdstrike! I was watching through binoculars and saw a crow go in and debris come out the back, on fire. Fortunately for the pilot there was enough thrust from the intact engine+burner to get him up and out of trouble so he could flop round a very short circuit and land in one piece. That must have stained his underwear fairly seriously - you really don't want a crisis with a large crowd of general public in blast range.

@gpaul said:

Hi Tim,

I'm Paul McLean and I am the Google engineer who is mostly responsible for text in LayOut.

Thanks very much for explaining the problem.

@gpaul said:

What you are trying to do is a great idea and entirely reasonable. The hitch is that LayOut stores text in the document in RTF format. RTF does not support alpha (transparency) values for font color, so that information is lost when the internal text engine generates the RTF for LayOut to store. Granted the UI shouldn't be giving the user the expectation that alpha is supported for text (this is a logged bug and not as easy to fix as you might imagine).

Ah, right. Good old RTF. I don't suppose the colour table in indexed by the font foreground command can include transparent colours? Probably not. RTF was carefully designed to be infuriating...

@gpaul said:

A work-around might be to create a "water-mark" image with transparency (PNG supports this) and overlay that on the page. Put it on a layer by itself and it will stay out of your way when editing the document.

Yah. Excellent idea. I already have the text on a layer so I can easily turn it off when the drawings are printed in final form, so this should be easy.

Thanks again.

[Edit] Created a PDF file with just the large text in low-opacity colour, inserted it into the draft layer and presto - no more issue.

OK, here's a cut down house model. The section cut has trimmed the garage trusses but the little white rhomboids on the 'cut - Kitchen section' layer are in the 'correct' place.
Example Section Cut.skp

To add a nice fat 'DRAFT' warning to my early LO files I added a layer with 'draft' in a very large fontsize and low opacity foreground colour. It prints perfectly well BUT after saving the file and reopening it the opacity value returns to the default 0% opaque solid black letters

@bjanzen said:

This speaks to unbounded versus bounded text boxes,

[snip]
Ah, I see what you mean. I'll modify my bug-claim then - the unbounded table seems to be really unbounded. It doesn't have a right edge (that I can discover) at the right edge of the paper area and in fact seems to place it completely off the right of the 'world'.

If the bounding box of the unbounded box (urk!) were actually selectable it would be easy and obvious what needed doing. I would also tend to expect that swapping from unbounded to bounded would create a bounding box around the available text i.e. typing some text and going unbounded>bounded ought to return the box to where it started.

Not seen this one mentioned -
'Graphic Guide to Interior Details' by Rob Thallon, Taunton Press 1998, ISBN-13: 978-1-56158-324-9 I got mine from Amazon for C$18.24

It's a reference work showing hundreds of detail drawings to illustrate how interior construction details are done. I found it absolutely fascinating and invaluable for doing my house model and LO work.

@garyk7 said:

Hi. I've been researching to find if anyone has come up with an efficient way to make working drawings from their models.

Have you read the http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15911&st=0&sk=t&sd=a thread and others?

I've been having a decent level of success with LayOut; I'm doing a house right now and just this morning had the first 36"x24" prints done. I'm quite pleased - in fact I'l attach the pdf exported from LO. It's not quite finished, some electrical planning needs more work and I think a few more detail drawings need to be done. All of it comes from the skp model, there's no added 2D drawing of any sort. LO isn't the most reliable app I've ever used but nor is it the worst crasher.
Ashling Rd.pdf

(A faintly similar problem was reported jan 08 in the general forum)

I see some odd effects when using section cuts in my house model.

a) as the section plane is moved some components get cut and other instances of the component get cut in the same place incorrectly - ie my rafters well behind the section get trimmed as the rafters intersecting the section plane get cut.
b) some components get cut in the wrong place altogether visually BUT when I use the plugin to add cut faces they appear in the right place.... so the geometry used by the plugin must be ok. I guess.
c) some components simply don't get cut at all but do disappear if the section plane passes their bounding box.

I can supply images or models if anyone needs them to debug this.

Just saw it this afternoon; loved it. It's not High Art. It's not Serious Social Commentary. Tough. Like any good fairy story HP includes some excitement, some drama, some love, some moral points (like 'treasure your friends', 'be kind','adults can be arseholes' etc) and some terror.

I enjoyed all the books. Again, not High Art. So what? They're still a better way to spend your time than religious claptrap or Heat magazine (which is, lets's face it, a weekly religious offering for the worshippers of celebrity). Rowling didn't create some amazing new thing; she put together a really nice version of a number of classic storytelling tropes, added some good characters, some good descriptive work and most of all built a story that actually got millions of kids to read something that took work to follow instead of mindless pap. Good for her.

Electrical Plan Symbols.layout
OK, here's a set derived from that webpage. I'm sure there are more that might be added at some point.

Open the LO file and save as scrapbook to add it to your system.

Problem - the text in the various symbols doesn't scale as you scale the damn symbols. Hunh? Any ideas?

[edit - replace file with one that has 1/2" and 1/4" diameter symbols per Barry's suggestion below]
[edit-edit - replace the damn file again with one that has more reasonable font sizes]

Interestingly if I import a TextEdit file and use text>table.. in the resulting text area it works just as I would expect.

Playing with that lead me to notice the context menu option 'make unbounded' which indeed makes the width of the text area .... unbounded. Sadly the 'make bounded' option available after doing that doesn't seem to do anything terribly helpful; perhaps it puts a right edge on the text area but since it is infinitely to the right I find it hard to scroll over to it.

Hazarding a guess, some flag about left-right bounds is not being used appropriately. Yet another case where having at least read access for the source would enable me to suggest a fix.

@dave r said:

Tim, since I steered you wrong with that link, I'll see if I can make it right. I'm waiting for a return e-mail from my brother. He might come up with something as a fix.

No guilt on your part Dave. It all looked fine in the snapshot.

I think it might actually be better drawn as LO graphics anyway since that includes rather better circles and line control.

Open a new LO doc.
create a text area and type a few words.
use menu text>table...
I get a table of effectively infinite width ie the left edge and right edge are waaaaaaaay off the paper edges. Not so useful. LO Version 2.0.020148

@bjanzen said:

Great suggestions, I'll look into it.

I made a related point in the SU wishlist forum; if we could find textures in an analogue of the 3DW it would be a helpful way to gather a lot of stuff together. Adding a decen search to the materials browser would make it easy to use. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't result in the memory explosion problem that the component browser does....

Ack! I loaded that model. <b>Horrible</b>! The circles are made up of many arrow headed lines. With jagged edges. And take a look at 'component 24' on the bottom row just left of the earthing symbol. Good grief. Or 'component 8' top row third from left.

Wow. Guess I'll draw my own directly in LO and see how that goes.

@dave r said:

Tim, the Scrapbook things like arrows and such are really SKP models so would something like this get you started?

Yes, yes it would. For some dumb reason it didn't even occur to me to look in 3DW for something essentially 2D.

Thanks again.....

I could really do with searching that works in the materials browser; it should ideally consider the material name and any meta-data that might be attached. For example, searching for 'maple' should find materials such as
'maple64'
'curlymaplepoppedgrain'
'maplebrown' the colour
'cupboard_door' the texture that happens to have metadata indicating that it is made from maple.

Right now there is a nasty abuse of the normal magnifying glass icon (used in OSX for spotlight search) to mean 'pick a colour off the screen'. Naughty, naughty.

For extra credit, build a user extensible online warehouse of textures and colours in a similar manner to the 3dwarehouse.

Has anyone found or drawn typical electrical symbols for us in LO? Most of them are pretty simple but it seems silly to do them myself if some nice person has already produced them...

I'm thinking of e.g. http://www.renovation-headquarters.com/electrical-symbols.htm

@honoluludesktop said:

I am guessing (because of the jumbled menus situation) that SU is the product of an old compiler from the late 1990s.

Fortunately that is pretty much impossible since there is a very small chance of such old compilers still being runnable on modern machines. Particularly on Macs, for example, due to the change from CodeWorrier to XcruciatingCode to support the intel Macs.

Something like the jumbled menus is probably more likely to be a library thing but even there it won't be 1990s vintage. It'll be a simple bug somewhere; something in a library that isn't as resilient to abuse as it could be combined with some tiny mistake that results in a null pointer where there ought to be a string pointe, for example. Happens all the time. It might not even be a fault in the SU code itself but in a routine that SU is the only commonly seen user for.

@outersketcher said:

I'm running the free version on SketchUp 7 on my 24" screen imac with system 10.5.7.

I can't run SketchUp 7 for more than 10 minutes before it crashes.

Ah. Forgot to update people on recent discoveries. On my machine (a new 24" iMac with the 4850 graphics card - jolly nice and fast by the way) the problem was just the same, so clearly not a random hardware problem.

It actually seems to be the Component browser. If I have that open, boom in short order - though more like an hour than 10 minutes) memory used up etc. If I open it and then close it - still the problem. If I run without ever opening it - no problem at all.

Very weird and rather inconvenient since I end up (ab)using the outliner (with all its deranged buglets) as a sort of ersatz component picker within the model.