As above. You can set the extension line length. This is great but the part of the extension below the line (or opposite to the drawing attachment) cannot be changed. It is stuck at about 2mm. Id like mine to be 1 or 1.5mm in each direction. Small thing but graphically significant when you have many dimensions stacked together.
Hope I explained this adequately.
Cheers
Hi, you posted 4 messages, 3 in individual threads and one in a thread that is 4 year old.
you wonât get many answers, because on one hand ,your questions are quite complex to understand. I mean, without a visual aid, itâs complex. and on the other hand, youâre asking 4 things about the SAME EXACT TOOL.
these are not 4 separate issues youâre having, but 4 issues with the dimension tool, the lines are a bit too long, the text is a bit too high, and IDK what else.
So Iâll do it simple. Iâll copy your other messages in this thread. That way we all can discuss about your 4 issues with the single mesurement tool.
cool ? 
(for anyone reading right now, give me a minute 
)
Do you mean thisâŚ
So, the other requests from @Rodog are :
To to sumup, you would like the dimension tool to :
Since youâre asking quite technical things about the dimension tool, I think it would help if you could show us screenshots of what you mean, a before / after or even just a big red circle on the issue (like they do on youtube)
edit yes, exactly this @PaulMcAlenan . images are simpler than words, especially when we donât all speak the same thing
thanks
I didnât want to make one huge combined post which could make the conversation even more confusing and difficult to explain.
I wanted the issues to be able to be discussed separately as they are separate issues with the one tool.
I wanted different thread titles so that if people were searching for those same issues they could connect with the thread relevant to their question and not get bogged down with all my other particular questions.
I thought of the issues at several different points throughout the day and wanted to ask them while I thought of them
Thanks again. Iâm sure you guys get a lot of annoying questions on here but we arenât all here trying to intentionally make your life hard.
Amazing. Thanks! Sorry it didnât occur to me that the start and end arrow dialogue was controlling that length once you entered the dimension edit mode. The problem is you can edit this after you have created the dimensions but canât set this shorter length as a parameter before I start creating the dimensions? I.e. as part of my template.
yes you can !
ok, itâs quite simple when you know about it :
open your template, and make a dimension. you can make it in the grey if you want. Here, you adjust all the parameters of your template. lines, length, colour, all.
then use the eyedropper on this dimension. and from now on, all the new dimensions I place will have this parameter (anything from the line style or the dimension style panels). If you save your template with this âready madeâ dimension on the side, then all you need is to eyedrop it and bam, ready to work.
let me show you
here, first is vanilla,
second I adjusted the top lines length and width, and I moved the textbox on the side. then eyedropper
thirds, you see, some of the parameters remained.
Unfortunately, and it answers some of your other questions, the position of the text is not a parameter in one of the side panel (I mean the distance between the text and the line). and it wonât be kept while using the eyedropper tool.
And yes. I forgot to do it, but if you change the text (size, font location under / over the line) it will register with the eyedropper.
so here on the 3rd line I put some blue lines, a purple text in 6pt and voilĂ . If I use the eyedropper on it, then all my future dimensions will use this template.
as for moving the text box closer to the line, I donât see a way to do it by default.
I can manually move it (then make the curved line white), but as I said earlier, the eyedropper trick wonât reproduce it because itâs not a parameter, itâs me (or you) physically moving the text box. 
as for the snapping dimensions.
snapping side by side s quite simple, layout keeps the inferences point, so you just need to pull the dimension next to the neighbour, and itâll snap.
what you can do if you want several dimension to behave as a group is select them and group them, like you would in SU. now if I pull to make the group longer, the proportion will be kept.
Thanks so much. Canât believe how fast you generated those tests and screenshots. haha. I will will play around with the eye dropper and hopefully get my template sorted!
Shame about the text position not being one of the parameters I can duplicate. When the text sits nice and close on top of the line it reads clearer and saves space. When I compare the same text size to my wifeâs Archicad drawings the text sits just above nearly kissing the dimension line.
Cheers
Iâm not working this week. had a week of teaching SU that got cancelled last minute for medical reasons. itâs either stalking the forum or binging netflix 
it works with many things.
do you like to have your text blocks prepared ? like a standard font + size for titles, another for general text ? then just prepare them both, then use the eyedropper on the one you want to reproduce.
basically, if you adjusted something using a side panel, you can eyedrop it to make it standard.
and if you forgot to eyedrop it BEFORE making other dimensions, then eyedrop your reference, itâll give you the bucket tool, then bucket the bad dimensions. theyâll fall in line.
@eric-s did a live session on layout recently, itâs in my watch list (or more a âlisten then have a look when something you donât know happens, like a podcast with visual aidâ list), but I browsed through it, and what Iâm talking about is around the 25 min mark
in the end, you would have a template with, on the side, all or the graphical element just as you like them. then, you would either use them directly, or copy them, or eyedrop them, depending.
It makes that part of the workflow faster, especially if you know what you want.
well, see this as an opportunity, now you have a secret way of knowing who made the plan just by looking at the printouts, SU or Acad
wait, two things :
you donât actually need to group the dimensions. I remember learning that⌠in another decade, but it works without grouping, just select all and theyâll stretch.
however, if you want them to get close / more distant without stretching (just by moving), itâll separate them from the model
second situation, I selected all (grouped or not) and stretched. so there is more space between the dimensions, BUT it keeps the same harmony as before.
third situation, I selected all and moved. so it kept the same distance between the dimensions, BUT itâ not attached to the model anymore.
hey @JQL the answer youâre looking for is discussed in this thread.
Selecting all together and dragging via the arrow tab is how I generally manipulate them⌠but as youâve shown in Example 2, this stretches the space between dimensions which is not the desired outcome.
Example 3 is not useful because the dimensions read incorrect values once they detach from the model. Its critical that dimensions remain attached and move as the model changes.
Neither of these help with laying the dimensions out accurately in the first instance. I want to place them accurately on top of one another as I create them. Snapping to set offsets is the default behavior in Revit and Acad.
stuff like that ?
have a first line of dimension, then a second line that âaddsâ them ? then yeah, no âduplicate toolâ, youâll have to remake the new dimension by clicking on the same inferences points as the first.
in (my french) layout, if you right click the paper space, you can either snap to objects or grid. or both.
by snapping to objects, you can place dimension on the SU actual points (seeing your screenshots, Iâm pretty sure you already know that but hey, others might not)
so yeah, to make the two 450 dimensions, you clicked on the points I marked green. and to make the 900, youâll have to reclick on the top and bottom. no shortcut on this one. as long as you click on the same points, they should snap on top of each others.
yeah, I thought about it, and the best solution Iâve got is exemple 2, but line by line then. select a line of dimension, and stretch it. then select then next one and so on. youâre kinda hitting the limits of layout here,
SO was not created as a CAD tool but a sketch one, they added LO, and it allows you to make plans from a SU file, but still, itâs not as complete as the equivalent in an actual CAD tool.
same way, itâs not as complete as indesign, or powerpoint. Itâs sitting at the intersection of the three, able to do a bit of every one but not actually 100%. thatâs where the frustration usually starts.
Ive got no problem snapping to parts in my model using object snap. I also regularly use the double click method to move across the model quickly creating a single chained dimensions. My issue is with this:
As you drag out each chain away from the model (in this case dragging a vertical dimension chain horizontally) there is no way to make them snap to one another (other than right on top of one another). You can see my offset drag distances done by hand-eye movement alone are all slightly different. The last one is even accidentally overlapping the second last (see circle). This distance should be set and snap automatically. Having to fiddle them to all look even is tedious.
Regarding your comment that Sketchup was originally conceived as a sketch tool and not a full CAD documentation softwareâŚWell I know and accept this but it now has many more users than at the beginning and we are now all paying $400AUD/year for licensing (and more if you go studio) so is it really too much to ask for them to start upgrading some of these basic quirks which are absolutely standard in other CAD programs?
use the grid to cheat. again, I agree, it could be systematic, but now we can just cheat with the grid.
if you enable âsnap to gridâ (right click on the background) when you do your dimensions, itâll allow you to be pretty constant. here is an example, snapping to the grid. the first is still not at a precise distance (depends on your building and where the element is compared to the grid), but the rest will follow.
here, the first is aligned on the grid, then the two extra are 2cm away, again snapped on the grid. (and since Iâm using vanilla dimensions, Iâve got a nice overlap. i know )
Yeah I have tried using this in the past but it has two problems:
The dimension tool tries to snap to the grid underneath instead of the precise points Iâm trying to find on the model viewport. I could turn it on after creating the dimensions but this again is another step readjusting them all.
The grid spacing is not necessarily quite right to get all the dimensions stacked exactly right. In some situations where we are close to the edge of a page you donât have the luxury of just pushing each dimensions out by another full grid box. I could set a really fine grid I guess but it might make other operations harder to do on the grid.
Probably my brain has been too slow this morning to follow these various threads about dimensioning in Layout.
Snapping stacked dimensions â if I am understanding correctly ( and Iâm not sure I do ), thenâŚ
âŚusing the dimension tool will not ( it seems ) snap to another dimension ( oversight bugâŚ? ) but an existing dimension or one that youâve just created will snap to other dimensions.
Does this help�
Iâm posting about dimension snapping in a thread about dimension line shortening
I tried to keep my different questions in different threads for clarity but others thought it better to put them all together.
From the responses Iâve had so far 3 out of my 4 questions are not resolvable within the current capabilities of Layout and therefore I want those things logged as feature requests (which is what I thought I was doing when I created Feature Request posts instead of technical help posts in the first place).
To summarize the answers
Yes you can adjust the length of the tail side of extension lines by double click editing each extension line and changing the âend arrowâ length. Thanks @PaulMcAlenan and @ateliernab. This is clunky to adjust but at least it can be applied at a template level via the eye dropper method. Thanks @ateliernab.
Text position can be moved manually after creating a dimension but it cannot be set by default (or template, or eye dropper) to sit closer to the dimension line upon creation. This is a feature I still request. The dimension text sits too far from the line it relates to by default. It should be nearly touching the line. (Note we donât use âinlineâ dimension styles for architectural documents as in the gif above^)
Stacked dimensions cannot be made to snap to one another for consistent offset and rearrangement in Layout. Current methods of dragging a selected group of dimensions stretches them appart rather than moving them as a locked/snapped group. This is a feature I still request.
Layout does not utilise multi-thread/multi-core processing for the operation âUpdate model referenceâ. This is a feature I request as It could possibly eliminate the 20 sec blue pinwheel wait times I experience every time I update my model reference.
Thanks very much guys for your help.
(Currently looking up Acad and Revit pricing.haha)
