The Bug: I am unable to resize the tool trays when they are pinned to the workspace. They each consume about 40% of my workspace leaving me very little to work with in between. The only way to return the tray size to normal (about 15% of the workspace) is to unpin it so that it auto hides to the side. As soon as I pin it, the tray width shown below is as narrow as it will go. I imagine it has something to do with switching my screen resolution settings as described below. It seems Layout is stuck to a 4K scale setting that is no longer in effect… Is there a way to reset this setting?
I have been experiencing this issue for the past few versions and it just reoccurred for the first time in 2022. I am working from an Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15" laptop which has a UHD 4K main screen and a similar UHD secondary screen above the keyboard (3840x1100 Resolution).
When I’m on the road, the built-in secondary screen is great as it gives me a spot to have my SketchUp tool pallets and Layout Tray’s so they don’t consume all of the screen real estate on my primary screen. Because the secondary screen is a non standard ratio, it only has the ability to be set at it’s UHD, 4K resolution, requiring the main display to also be 4K.
When I am at my desk, I have a two 27" 1080 HD monitors I prefer to work from. I disable the built-in secondary screen and downscale my laptops 4K screen to 1080, this gives me three 1080 HD screens with consistent scaling across each.
I have no need to work in 4K, and there is definitely a performance advantage to only rendering 25% of the pixels in the SU window. Performance advantages aside, neither SketchUp or Layout really seem to like 4K displays, the tool pallet scaling is all over the place, especially for 3rd party plugins. If it weren’t for my UHD secondary screen, I would leave everything set to 1080 and this would probably not be an issue.
Well… After fiddling with the UserDockLayout.xml file in the AppData\SU\Layout folder I was able find a “MinimumSize” parameter that was set to 700 for each of my three trays. With find-and-replace I changed all of the 700 values to 300 and this seemed to work… On first launch… On subsequent launches Layout now crashes immediately, not even generating a bug splat.
A good-old fashioned re-boot seems to have resolved the crashing… My tool trays are holding tight at their preferred minimum widths… My fingers are staying crossed…
Yes, after some frustrating attempts to edit the .xml files per my previous post. Make sure to save backups of everything in that folder just in case. Layout overwrites all of the .xml files each time it opens. Basically it saves the workspace after each session, similar to what you would expect in SketchUp if you change your tool pallets.
Editing the “minimumSize” parameter worked to get Layout to launch without the trays stuck at an absurd width.
It just took a restart or two and once I got Layout to launch with the trays the correct width, I opened a layout file, saved it and closed layout so that Layout would overwrite the .xml files with the desired workspace.
I wouldn’t call this a solve, but it definitely resolved my issue… More importantly I figured out how to reduce the resolution of my secondary screen from UHD to regular HD to avoid the conflicting display scale issues.
This continues to be an issue for me as well. I run Sketchup and Layout on my laptop with dual external monitors from my office. When working remotely and/or connecting to a single monitor that I sometimes connect to when working remotely or from a jobsite my Layout Tray sizing gets screwed up and I have to jump through hoops to get it corrected again for working from my office setup. A solid fix for this would be appreciated.
Hi Dave, Curious if SketchUp 2023 on a Windows 11 Home machine gives you any in site on how I might resolve the Layout Tray size issues I am experiencing. Thank you, Karl
I had some time to complete a uninstall and re-installed selecting Run as Administrator with everything coming back as it was before. All my modified trays came back with the same size issues. Do I need to delete more system files after the uninstall to avoid this and get a truly clean install?
I expect this is just a case of opening the program with different displays. The .json file that stores the information about tray width along with toolbar visibility states and so on gets updated when you save and close SketchUp or LayOut. The next time you open the application that file gets read to figure out how to display those things. It has no way to know that you’ve changed from dual displays to a single one or the other way around.
I suppose you could make a copy the .json files created when the dual displays are connected and then make a copy of the .json files when only a single display is connected. Before opening SketchUp or LayOut you can swap the .json files to suit the display(s).
@DaveR deleting the .json files worked to re-set the size of my tray. It also restored it to factory settings. I like the idea of storing a .json file as a backup to use to restore the defaults I want when working with different monitor setups.
Thanks for your help! This has been driving me crazy for a while now.
Deleting the .json file works to reset the tray size to the factory settings, however, trying to copy and save it in a file to be used to restore custom tray settings does not seem to work. At least, I have a work around to restore the factory settings when my tray size is out of proportion to my drawing space.
I hadn’t actually tryied swapping .json files. I was just sort of thinking out loud before my coffee kicked in. Seems to me that for what you are trying to do, deleting the .json (which will probably change other things you don’t want it to change) is perhaps the least expensive option. The alternative would be a second computer so each one can stay set up for the displays used with it. Not a cheap option but maybe a better option in the long haul. If you have internet acces when on site you could be leveraging your Trimble Connect storage and the features that gives you, too.
In all of my initial issues I found that so long as the screen resolution (scaling) was equal between the two setup-scenarios the tray size was not problematic. Once I had my dual-monitor 4K laptop screens set to the 1920x1080 resolutions to match my monitors, everything worked as expected when switching. It just requires resetting the workspace to make sure all of my trays are visible. The widths stay consistent.
Also, layout seems to be much happier working at the lower resolution so overall it’s the best performing setup as well.
I just wanted to ad that I’ve been having the exact same issue as @guidepro & @karlsketch. The trays in layout get stuck at a set width taking up the whole screen when using my laptop unplugged. Seems to particularly happen if I’ve shutdown while docked and then startup again on the train. Windows only become resizable after I’ve plugged back into my monitors/dock at home. Laptop monitor is 4k, home monitor is 4k but my monitor at work is 1080p. I will try guidepro’s xml. file edit trick but I haven’t ever tried altering those files. (nor should I have to?)
Hi everyone, I’ve been reading these and other threads as I started experiencing this issue as well and nothing really worked for me but reinstall SU, making sure that I deleted everything on the computer’s roaming folder.
One of the things that occurred to me is that I the issue began when I set the external monitor (in my case a Samsung ultrawide) to be my main display. It could be just a coincidence, but since the reinstall of SU I haven’t been having issues until now with my laptop still as a main display.
