I often use SketchUp leader text to mark areas, heights, lengths of things within the SketchUp model.
This is because I can tag lots of faces, edges (contour lines) etc, or whatever, using various Extensions, and then automate them into an Excel table.
But one thing always bugs me.
When Text is placed in sketchup, it never stays in the center of where I placed it. There are no Align or Justify tools to shift it relative to its “base point”. This a problem both in 3d space, and also in 2d Outputs using LayOut.
Example (LayOut):
Note that I’ve marked in red dots where the “location point” is; and in my examples this can be something either that is placed manually (eg my contour labels), or can be automated via an extension that places them at the ‘centroid’ of the face).
You can see that #166 for example is not in the ideal location. In this case it’s fairly obvious that #164 and #168 are the adjacent faces, but in other parts of the model where the faces are smaller (more crowded text) it can be confusing/misleading to the viewer.
The graphic below shows where I would like to move it to (using align tools)… Is this possible?
I guess not in SketchUp (without help of an extension, maybe)
In LayOut, you got a couple of options for native LayOut labels.
Anchor Top, Center and Bottom of the bounded label is the most obvious, but you can also align the leader line:
(select the label, hit Enter or Return, then drag the endarrow to a green dot on the bounded label text.)
Of course, this would make much more sense if we could add a sequencing autotext besides the Area attribute without adjusting each label manually.
Here each dimension (inside a group) has its text replaced manually.
To go even further, this might be done by an extention reading the face area and then removing/replacing the dimension’s texts of each individual face that has such a group placed ontop.
LayOut’s dimension adjustment tools are much more powerful, but adding leader text in LayOut takes far too long (it can take 10 seconds just to add one label on a complex drawing).
I’ve been experimenting with using LayOut’s xyz position text value, and just using Z position to define the height of Contours, but it’s not a great workaround.
For the time spent on these workarounds, it’s usually just quicker to look at the contour line in sketchup, then place a “dumb” text box label in LayOut and manually type the value, format/rotate the box, etc…hardly a 21st century workflow.
But can you controle leader text to better align the orientation of contour lines etc. like you could with dimension text?
And lock them (the groups they are in)
