Lost Model! A lot of work will be lost... HELP

The bug were fixed with the initial release of SketchUp 2019.

The leader text bug was mostly fixed in 2019, though the fix is imperfect and it might be impossible to do better.

The issue is that leader texts have a link to an Entity that anchors them. That link lets them follow the Entity around the model when you move the Entity or manipulate the view by zoom, orbit, etc. The bug occurred when that link Entity was a Face that got deleted or replaced during an edit. Lacking the target of the link, SketchUp mis-calculated the text position as being infinitely far from the model. SketchUp 2019 no longer causes the position to blow up, but lacking the original link target it will sometimes cause the leader to point to somewhere outside the bounds of the original Face.

The link is not exposed in the Ruby API, so people fixing the issue have to either delete the offending text (e.g. by the cut and paste methods mentioned or by Ruby code), or reposition it somewhere arbitrary such as the origin so that it can be seen and perhaps recreated at the right place (you can’t attach a leader text to a different link using either the GUI or Ruby code).

2 Likes