Shortest distance between two skew lines

[Wo3Dan]

Derived from this thread (Angular Dimension Tool - #8 by slbaumgartner and quoted text) I was thinking whether and how SketchUp could “do the math” for me with two skew lines (guides) from two 3D edges to give me the location and length of the shortest distance.

@slbaumgartner

The final straw was that I found it is ambiguous what entities actually define the angle. As you note, is it a pair of edges? Three vertices? How does one cope when an edit causes an edge to split into two - which of them now defines the angle? What about “virtual” cases where two edges don’t actually extend to the vertex where they would have intersected? In a single situation, a person can easily answer these questions, but handling them in general algorithmically became quite complex and unreliable.

For given example (image) it seemed to do the trick quite well:

[eneroth3]

This is already in the API.

Module: Geom

[Wo3Dan]

@eneroth3

This is already in the API

I’m quite happy to do this with SketchUp’s native tools that are understandable (I hope and guess) to all of us. That was my challenge.
I’m sure that a plugin could be written to wrap this challenge into a general approach. But to be honest, I couldn’t tackle this with Ruby. You may if you wish.