If you have a question about one of my extensions, chances are some other user has the same question. So ask it here, and let's all share in the answer!
FlatText's "text_in_a_box" method would work perfectly for this, Erik.
The only tricky part is determining how big to make the text and where to place it on the component. For that, you might need some human intervention, unless you are already using Ruby to build the components in the first place (in which case you can define some rules in your code).
If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please feel free to email me using the "Contact Us" form on my Home page.
Hi Dave, In our studio we are designing recreational units, small houses and all kinds of furniture. We often implement CNC production methods in our designs and because most of the time there are a lot of parts in a project, we have to add labels to them, to be able to easily find them again later, when the assembly starts (the CNC engraves the labels onto the parts). We are currently testing a route from sketchup to Carve pro to get the parts ready for CNC machining. I already tested Flat text and it seemed to work great. The "rules" in this workflow are that the text has to be inside the part component and on a separate layer, called "text". The parts we draw are components in SKP, already with their own component name, so it would be great if Flat text could automatically adopt that name and we wouldn't have to type it by hand. It could save time and reduce the risk of making an error. Maybe it could even name every part at once, using the component name, imagine that:)
We are now working on a prototype of this unit, the structure contains about 120 different parts.
The longer answer is: How would you like this to happen? What do you see happening in SketchUp (and what User action triggered it) that would fulfill your wish?
FlatLeaders already do this, if you call the menu command Tools>FlatLeader>Place Leader. When you mouse over a component, the Place tool first tries to use the component's instance name as its pre-loaded text. If there is no such name, it then tries to use the component's definition name. For FlatText to do this sort of behavior, you would have to write some Ruby code that uses the "FlatTextObject.text_in_a_box" method.
Can you describe the use scenario you're looking for?
FlatText's "text_in_a_box" method would work perfectly for this, Erik.
The only tricky part is determining how big to make the text and where to place it on the component. For that, you might need some human intervention, unless you are already using Ruby to build the components in the first place (in which case you can define some rules in your code).
If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please feel free to email me using the "Contact Us" form on my Home page.
Hi Dave, In our studio we are designing recreational units, small houses and all kinds of furniture. We often implement CNC production methods in our designs and because most of the time there are a lot of parts in a project, we have to add labels to them, to be able to easily find them again later, when the assembly starts (the CNC engraves the labels onto the parts). We are currently testing a route from sketchup to Carve pro to get the parts ready for CNC machining. I already tested Flat text and it seemed to work great. The "rules" in this workflow are that the text has to be inside the part component and on a separate layer, called "text". The parts we draw are components in SKP, already with their own component name, so it would be great if Flat text could automatically adopt that name and we wouldn't have to type it by hand. It could save time and reduce the risk of making an error. Maybe it could even name every part at once, using the component name, imagine that:)
We are now working on a prototype of this unit, the structure contains about 120 different parts.
Hello Dave, I have a question about flat text, or actually its more of a wish:) Could flat text be made able to automatically use the component name?