I’d like to make electrical diagrams with Sketchup and would need to make lines in different colors and have them thicker than the line tool is. Is this possible. Would like to make something like the attached. I’m currently using InDesign for this and wondering if Sketchup would be better.
Electrical Simrad InstallE .pdf (159.0 KB)
Seevee
Using Sketchup Make 17.3.116
We do this here with a mixture of Sketchup and Layout. The drawing you provided would be Layout only because there is no real 3D Geometry in it. But we often combine the drawings with 3D-viewports from Sketchup to show where we placed what element.
If you don’t plan to use 3D there is no real point of doing this in Layout though if you are comfortable in InDesign as InDesign (while not build for this particular purpose) provides a much larger generic tool-set.
With Make, Layout is probably no option in this case.
Looking at your PDF you could easily do that in Powerpoint… not sure why such specialist software like Indesign (2d) or Sketchup (3d) would be needed… much cheaper, and more universal…just don’t think of Powerpoint as slides… you can set any document size you want… I often produce A1 schematic plans using it
Powerpoint as “smart shapes that” make linked connections much quicker
Hobby? Making electrical diagrams?
Thanks for the replies… not a hobby, make these for electical installs I do. Indesign is fine, but a tad slow.
I’ll try Power Point, thanks.
Thx, but Power Point doesn’t come close. How do I change the line thicknes and color?
Buy SU pro and it’s easily done with LO. It sounds like you are using it for commercial purposes, so PRO is required for that. The free versions are for personal use only.
i’ve been using the Google suite “Slides” for making electrical diagrams - and line weights are easy. plus you can script (JavaScript) objects if you want to something with that. it has snap-grid and you can make groups so once you have your basic symbols, just create a template.
Copy of electrical_components.pdf (1.0 MB)
I myself would use PowerCADD just because I have it, and it’s so similar to Adobe Illustrator which is just the sort of app for this kind of illustration. That said, you might want to look at Illustrator’s chief competitor, Affiinty Designer for just over $50.
There’s also an iPad version for just over $20:
Sorry but you are very wrong! Nevertheless this is not a powerpoint forum…
I have much more graphic control of lines in Powerpoint than Layout
Have not even talked about animating them
Agree… I have the entire Affinity Suite for my graphic design tasks… but still Powerpoint has 90% of the capabilities and some unique features that is already on 99% of everyone’s PC… I don’t get how blindingly obvious a tool can be and everyone ignores it!.. particularly considering most people only use 5% of the capability of their software
and if you have a gmail account, you have the google suite and the “slides” application has many of the features of powerpoint (i’m a long time powerpoint user) in a simplified UI and would meet the majority of presentation tasks. (i’ve been in a couple of organizations now using gsuite and have found it quite decent and with improvements over the past two years, is often my goto for cloud based authoring tools)
You might check out the PrettyPrint plugin.
You won’t see the results on screen, but you can make PDF files with full control of line weights and line shapes (round/square caps, miter/bevel joints, etc.) directly from SketchUp Pro.
You should give Inkscape a try. It’s free, and it has a very shallow learning curve.
++1 and inkspace native format is SVG so lot’s of options to reuse that.
Medeek makes an electrical plugin for sketchup that is great.
The example is a different kind of electrical diagram. It looks more like a flow chart kind of graphic. There have been apps specifically for that task too, but I haven’t looked at any of them in at least 20 years.
Changing line thickness (called “weight”) in PowerPoint is from a drop down list as I recall.
Select the line that you want to change. …
Under Drawing Tools, on the Format tab, in the Shape Styles group, click the arrow next to Shape Outline. …
Point to Weight, and then click the line weight that you want.
Unfortunately SU and LO do not support SVG natively for import and export… you need extensions
