CutList and Materials Plugin Tip

Hi Dave,

Good tip! Same goes for the material name.

For those who have their sketchup language setting set to other than English ( ie: other than en-US or en-GB), the same comment applies but here the use of the semi-colon in a component or material name would cause an issue. The comma is used for the decimal ‘point’ for measurements in the standard European notation and so the delimiter for the columns in the CSV file is the semi-colon(’;’)

Btw, since this appears to be an issue, I will look at putting in a solution which will reduce or eliminate this issue. It is easy enough to filter out the characters being used as delimiter from any text fields before writing the CSV file. I’ll add this to the things to do list!

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com

Thanks Steve.

Not to add to your work but would it be possible allow the user to specify a different delimiter such as tab? That would allow the file to be imported directly into Word or other word processor without ending up with a bunch of commas to clean up.

Thanks again.

-- Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk.

What plugin?.. Where do I find it, and what does it do?
Thanks
David

The plugin creates a cutlist from your SketchUp model. It can be found here:

Keep in mind that its accuracy depends upon how accurately you make your SketchUp model.

-- Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk.

Hi Dave,

I had a little play around with the delimiter value. Just replacing the comma with a tab produces a more readable output but it still doesn’t necessarily line up the columns because of the variable length of some of the text fields. I’d have to do more to make sure that it looks right as a text file.

If the idea here is to make a printable version of the cutlist, maybe it’s better to leave the commas in, read the file in with Excel and then print from there. Excel will do a nice job of placing each of the columns back in order. You can add borders or underline titles, etc with Excel. It’s the main reason the file format exists.

Let me know if I am missing something here about the motivation to read it in using a word processor ( is it because not everyone has excel? I use OpenOffice calc on my home PC)

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com

Hi Steve,

Yeah, I know there are issues with the tab. I was just kind of thinking.

I’ve been using your plugin with models I’ve been drawing for plans. After drawing the models, I’m using Layout to create the document. When I get to the cutlist I open the CSV file in Excel, massage it a little bit there, delete some columns that I don’t need, copy and paste it into Word, convert from table to text, do a little more formatting and then copy that and paste it into a text box in Layout. It’s fairly quick as it is. I was just thinking it could be faster if one could skip opening a program but I see other issues so no worries.

Cheers,

Dave

-- Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk.

Ah!

So what would really rock your world is to have the layout and the cutilist output in a single file. One button to produce the entire project files.

That sounds like a worthy pursuit!

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com

Steve, that would be cool. I was talking about Layout, the presentation application that comes with the pro version of SketchUp. Like this:

For this:

-- Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk.

Hi Dave,
That’s a very slick way to view your project. Sketchup keeps surprising me!

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com