Reading the

@unknownuser said:

NOTE: calling add_group with entities in its parameters has been known to crash SketchUp before version 8.0. It is preferable to create an empty group and then add things to its Entities collection.

I'm asking if this is the bug case or is my mistake?
I have a group of 2 lines and want to group the first line.
I have put this in the ruby console:

group1=Sketchup.active_model.selection[0]
group1.entities.add_group(group1.entities[0])

The result is that the line is not in the subgroup ,but in the new group outside the group1.
If I delete it,it is also deleted in the group1.
I would expect to have 1 group(group1) , 1 subgroup with the line and 1 ungroupped line inside group1.

Is it a bug?

@tig said:

If you want to know the orientation of a face relative to its edge, then use this http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/edge.html#reversed_in?
You can then compare the three faces sharing a common edge and if one is 'backwards' used face.reverse! OR use face.normal.reverse in the testing ???

This could be exactly what I need,have to test first.
Thanks.

@tig said:

You cannot have arbitrary rules about the front/back of the face.

This is the biggest sub-problem in this problem,I think.
There is a face side entity missing.

@kyyu said:

How about comparing distance to face center points (face.bounds.center)?

Hmm,seems too dependent of the face size.Should be size independent and also face shape independent.

3 faces connected on 1 edge.
Want to know which face is closest to face1 (face2 or face3),if I look from the back face side.
I know face2 is closest,but want Ruby to decide
I have experimented with normal.angle_between but no success.
Any suggestions?

@dan rathbun said:

group.local_bounds()

Yes,it is working,I have test it....BUT,it is only available for groups,not components.

Ok,I got it.
The mistake was that I was taking the bbox of the group,but should take a bbox of the definition of the group,like in your plugin.
But why didn't you told me to look in your plugin?

Ok,I have check your plugin and find the line

       pts = self.bound_points(bb).map { |pt| pt.transform( entity.transformation ) }

interesting.But I have already try to put the transformation to my point,but the result is wrong:

cube=Sketchup.active_model.selection[0]
point=cube.bounds.corner(0)
point.transform!(cube.transformation)
UI.messagebox point.to_s

The result that I get is wrong (-0,-1.707,0).
As you can see on the picture it should be (-0,-0.707,0).
What em I doing wrong?

No,I will explain more:
I have rotated the group for 45 degrees.
If I call the group.bounds.corner(0) ,I get the point of the axis aligned bbox (green circle on the picture).
Instead,I want to have the coordinates of the bbox on the screen ,witch is NOT axis aligned(red circle on the picture).

Thanks,but I don't need the real bbox.I just need to retrieve the coordinate of one of the corners of the bbox on the picture.
It should be (-0.707 , 0 , 0) or (0 , -0.707 , 0) .

Hello.
I have a problem to get the coordinates of the rotated bonding box corner.
On the screen is different bounding box than what I get with group.bounds.corner[0] (this is why "double bounding box" tittle). You can see it on the picture.
I have tried to apply the transformation of the group to the corner point,but the result is not right.

I want to have the coordinates of the corner of the bounding box that is on the screen,so x or y should be 0.

Uff,I missed this one,thanks.
The only problem that I see is that I need a reference to the face.So ,if I don't have it,I have to loop all faces.That is not very nice
I have another solution in my mind,but didn't test jet: edge.faces.length should be more than 0.
But I'm not shure if the line that I draw on the face will be somehow connected with the face.
I remember the old versions of sketchup,where the line was floating on the face (bold).

I'm not trying to make a tattoo on my face ,just want to detect ,if the line (edge) that I draw,is on the face.
Example:

 model.active_entities.add_line( start, end )  

Now I want an information if this entire line is on some face.

The problem was in the file,not in the code.
I have saved the file in notepad as UFT-8 ,so I can "unpack" the character.
I have tried to save the file in other formats (unicode,ANSI,unicode big endian) and is always giving me errors.
So only UFT-8 is ok.
Problem solved

Hello.
Another unicode related problem.I can repeat this one only reading from a file,so the file with 1 character is attached.
I can read a character,but is causing some problems if I want to unpack it or concatenate it with other strings.
Here is the sample,where I want to unpack it:

	langfile= Sketchup.find_support_file("fr1.lang" , "Plugins/")

	IO.foreach(langfile) do |line|
		UI.messagebox line.unpack('U*')
	end

The error is :"Error Loading File new.rb
malformed UTF-8 character (expected 3 bytes, given 2 bytes)"

Why is this,how to deal with it?

fr1.lang

Yes, I'm implementing my own translation system.Strings are in files,like you suggested.

Thank you for the very useful reading.
Seems that is a lot of work to implement multilingual support.

Hello.
If I put the code

UI.messagebox "weiß"

in the Ruby console inside Sketchup,is working ok.
But the same code inside the plugin is giving me an error.
I have try it in notepad++ and NetBeans with the some result.

Why is that,what to do about?

But also Dan's suggestions have positive results:
In the activate method of the tool I have put the

Sketchup.active_model.start_operation "myTool",true,true,false

And I have put the

Sketchup.active_model.abort_operation

in the deactivate method of the tool and in the onPreSaveModel model observer.
Now the group is disappear before saving the model.
Thank you both.

Thank you for pointing this out,I was really stacked wit this BugSplat.
So, more new functions to learn.