I may have forgotten something but I cannot find the answer.
When using the Scale tool, I know that I can enter a specific dimension instead of a scale factor.
I just made a test with different versions of SU including 2023 using, for example 250mm;400mm;500mm to resize a cube without any problem.
How can I use imperial dimensions like feet inches and fractions. I cannot enter ’ for feet or " for inches since a press of the SHIFT key places the ’ or " character in the Dimension Window and clears it completely, deleting the value I just entered. Typing pi for pied (feet in French) or ft for feet as well as po for pouces (inches in French) or in doesn’t work either. I checked the help to no avail. The Instructor window is not better and the Status bar message is truncated. This should use two lines or more when required even if it would mean that the modelling window would shrink somewhat.
I know I can do that using the tape measure but, for 3 dimensions, it takes much more time than entering values such as 12’8 3/4;15’7 3/8;3’6 5/16 and pressing the Return key to validate.
I knew that was something simple. I was not clicking to end the scale before entering the dimensions. What was fooling me is that it was working after the first click when I was using metric units but not with ’ and " for feet and inches since these need using the Shift key and this is a modifier key for the Scale Tool. But, with the second click it works with any kind of units.
For your interest, there are three ways to use the scale tool:
click-drag-release type into VCB
click-move-click type into VCB
click-move-don’t click, type into VCB
In SketchUp 2020, with an AZERTY keyboard, you will either get no scaling, an error about being an invalid scale, or it might actually do what you wanted. Depends on which technique you’re using, and whether you intended to do uniform scaling or not.
In 2023, and 2022, all three should work, but at least one of them goes through a visual glitch, where for a moment you think you are going to get uniform scaling. When you finish typing the scaling is back to what you wanted.
We did try to fix all cases, it wasn’t easy, but did come up with a way to avoid the visual glitch. That didn’t make it into 2023.0, but hopefully will be added in an update.
For me the methods 1 and 3 produce the same problem when trying to input imperial units using ’ and/or ". The VCB clears and I only see the ’ or " character and, of course, receive a message about invalid unit. With metric units I have no problems.