We hired a new sketchup user with a mac. She has always used mac, but never sketchup. We, based on Trimble’s lack of transparency on the major differences between mac and PC versions, decided it was best that we buy her a mac and install the mac version. In case you haven’t tried switching to mac, don’t just don’t. We spent $3k on a horrible user experience. How would you like to be limited to a handful of icons in the single row toolbar? Personally, on my PC I have 4 rows of icons. Impossible on the mac. How would you like the fonts, colorpicker, and document settings to be completely different interfaces? How would you like all of the keyboard shortcuts to be completely different with no consistency at all? Sometimes, you press the option key instead of the CTRL shortcut. Sometimes it’s the command key. Sometimes, it’s still the CTRL key. You take a piece of software that’s all about gestures and muscle memory and make it completely different on a different platform. NO THANKS. What a mess. We’re trying to show her how fun and freeing it can be to use sketchup and layout, as opposed to what all the other software on the market has to offer, but instead, she just sees us getting frustrated at the poorly designed interface and nonsensical shortcut keys.
If free software like Blender and LibreOffice can get the interface the same all platforms, sketchup is just being lazy. I know why they did it. I used to code on windows and mac. It’s PURE LAZINESS. Nothing else. Build your own interface, guys. It will only take one year max and everyone will be happy afterwards. The mac supports none of the cool toolbar features windows has. Fix it yourself like adobe, autodesk, blender, open office, librecad, reaper, gimp, inkscape, corel, avid, steam, PureRef, Firefox, Krita, ClipStudio, Presonus, Ableton, and Afinity did. (to name just a few)
Ok. That’s the end of my rant about the abysmal port to mac. Don’t think I’m a mac hater. It’s what I use at home. I’ve also worked as an audio engineer and greatly prefer mac for that and most other tasks.
Now to the meat of this post. We have drawings going back years that use the Trebuchet MS font. When our new user opens the file on mac, there is no problem. She can edit as usual. It’s as soon as anyone tries to follow behind her on a PC. The file will open with no errors on the windows version and all the text looks ok but not perfect. Any time a text box or the text itself is edited while on pc, we get a font subsitution box pop up which recommends Verdana instead of Trebuchet (which is obviously already installed). How do we fix this?
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