I would love to see SU devise a dimension line that would recognize the boundary of the drawing and offset the dimension lines a given amount. My attachment illustrates this better than I can describe. I spend a lot of time moving the extension lines from the original snapping on the form and aligning them on the LO drawing. All of my dimensioning is done in LO
I agree. If someone knows how, it would be a valuable addition.
But, having attempted to code such things in a past life I found that it is a very hard problem. A large part of the issue is that dimensions are subject to what I’ve seen called “secondary notation”. That is, the placement and arrangement of the dimensions can be chosen artfully to make them easier for a person to understand. But coding what that means is a rat’s nest of specific cases and exceptions that rapidly gets very ugly!
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Some more user control of dimension styles could be in order. For instance, in our parts it is customary to suppress the extension lines except for a short line that is part of the arrowhead.
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Thanks @sketch3d_de for referring to my post there and the constructive contributions you made to it. I posted it at the time coming from a professional exposure as architect in Switzerland and Germany where specific dimensioning standards are strictly applied and unfortunately not supported by SketchUp Pro/Layout, and because I think a number of users may face comparable difficulties in various countries and industry areas.
I saw in-between a number of other related posts, this one for example gives also interesting perspectives on the topic’s complexity:
Gully’s wishlist - see esp. 3.e about dimension tolerances…
On the one hand, I think dimensioning deserves the same attention as localization (language, number formats etc.) or import/export formats – no matter how good a software is intrinsically, communication and exchange aspects can make or break its destiny.
On the other hand: to my knowledge, the only viable CAD tools that solution the kind of problems referenced here are about ten times more expensive than SketchUp Pro.
A more comprehensive support of dimensioning and annotations is not only a challenge in terms of coding, it requires researching across relevant application fields and locale and would inevitably result into a more sophisticated user interface – let’s hope this product positioning dilemma is getting sensibly approached.
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