Lofting! That's the word I needed to remember... now what was I asking about?

Oh yeah; curviloft by Fredo. Does a lot of astonishing things and I might even be able to work out how to control which one it does for me 😄
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=248195#p248195

@tim said:

..., for this case as an example, one could actually create a blank page and set it up as needed rather than having a rather cockeyed 'new' message that actually creates, does setup that isn't wanted and then leaves one to work out how much to undo… right now it isn't 'new' but 'copy'.

Well we are supposed to be able to do this with the flags argument in the add() method. see page.update() for an explanation of the flags.

What it is missing, is a camera argument. It assumes you wish to copy the current view.camera
So you have to modify the new page's view / camera after it is created. (It gets set to the current selected page, whether you want this or not.)

That's the usage I put in - with the second parameter 'true'. It does indeed speed up making many scenes, quite noticeably.

I haven't fully characterised how many scenes need to be undone to cause a crash (EDIT - I said originally 'kill' and I realised you might be thinking 'slow down horribly' rather than crash, burn, quit rudely etc) but since 'a few' works OK (except for the damned pages staying in place instead of going away) and 'a few dozen' crashes, I guess it's somewhere in the middle.

@tim said:

Yeah but you know what it's like -

Yes I've been there.

Was just teasing. 😛

And it takes awhile to get used to how they organized the API.

Thank you Tig. I put this code in the toolbar editor. Works great.

Doc and code drifting is quite possibly one of the biggest issues affecting code maintainability. I've never quite got over the idiocy of a few people I've worked with that really took to heart the attitude of "documents and comments? Why do you think it's called 'code'?" Certainly when I was managing a team I didn't let anyone get away with that - at least where I could detect it…
An old colleague came up with a pithy way to describe what ought to happen - "don't document the code, code the document!"

I didn't know that there is a separation between Page and View; now I do, so thanks for that. The specific problem I had with my code was that with no named page in a fresh drawing simply adding a page, hiding everything, adding my new layer, adding the copy of the selected component and updating the page left an apparently mangled drawing because there was still only one page visible and it no longer had the main model visible. I can see that going down well with anyone trying out a new plugin! As a workaround I've made it add a default new page before adding my 'real' new page so that at least there is no nasty surprise.

@tim said:

@dan rathbun said:

Also if you have the DynamicComponents extension loaded, it adds some scaling methods to Group and ComponentInstance.
Undocumented Geom::Transformation methods?

... If it is only added by an extension, I imagine I'd have to check that it exists and is active on the target system.

if the DC extension is loaded, Then:
` defined?($dc_observers)
>> global-variable

defined?(DCObservers)
>> constant`

The keyword defined? returns nil (so evals false,) if the arg is undefined.

And further if the DC extension is loaded:
Geom::Transformation.method_defined?(:rotx) %(#008000)[>> true] %(#000000)[As well as:] roty rotz xscale yscale zscale

Sketchup::ComponentInstance.method_defined?(:scaled_size) %(#008000)[>> true] %(#000000)[As well as:] local_transformation last_scaling_factors unscaled_size %(#000000)[(and one that only the DC extension should call:] set_last_size %(#000000)[)]

.

My first version of an attempt at solving this is http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=45790

Marc,

I've done dimensioned three or four projects with LO2013 and haven't had any problems with offset dimensions at all.

Thank you so much for the fix.

Yes, this is a known bug but will hopefully get fixed soon.

@tim said:

Here it is anyway - modified Housebuilder.rb with the door sizing fixed to compensate for the rough opening offset

I downloaded HouseBuilder.rb. Should HouseBuilder_extension.rb be removed from the plugins folder?

@lusodxb said:

Hi im new to this forum and am having problem exporting my model form skp 8 pro to dwg! can anyone help?
Thanks

If you describe the problem we might.

Tim - if you can send me the file, I'll take a look, fix it, and see if we can categorize it.

b

About section plane to display or not (and the section to display or not), you may create a style (from the house icon, save it by right click on your style library) with these "forced" options (checked).

Because the style library is shared with Layout, you may fix the problem from Layout by selecting the special style. A lot of time saved and very ergonomic solution !

I have saved for example these styles :

Colored fine with section (only section displayed, without section planes) Colored fine without section (no section & section planes displayed)

@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.

I have also found the Francis Ching has some similar books which are excellent!