Sketchup is crashing, trying to print to PDF?

Technical Problems SketchUp
21

Hi Matthes

Please keep submitting the BugSplats. We don’t typically respond unless we need more info. In general the reports help us out A LOT to identify where we should focus our efforts. Off hand I’m not sure if we’ve fixed any print to pdf crashing issues recently but will do some digging when I can.

Another suggestion, since you’re a sketchUp Pro user, is to try printing from LayOut. Its specifically designed for printing multi-page, scaled documents and it has much better line weight controls than printing from sketchUp will get you.

~Bryce

1 Like
22

Personally I tend to not spend energy on these since there’s such an easy workaround. It is crashing in handling textures. Any other SketchUppers looking at this, ping me for url’s if you don’t see his crashes.

23

Intel integrated graphics are not “reasonable”. They are basically only good for office applications.

The SketchUp Hardware and Software Requirements page says it best:

SketchUp’s performance relies heavily the graphics card driver and it’s ability to support OpenGL 2.0 or higher. Historically, people have seen problems with Intel-based cards with SketchUp. We don’t recommend using these graphics cards with SketchUp at this time.

Have you tried switching off “Use maximum texture” size in the OpenGL settings ?

24

To SketchUp team: I completely understand that it is not feasible to reply individually to all bug splats, especially where these might just be repetitions of the same known bug or something that has long been fixed.

I reckon, however, even a simple one-line reply like “This is a known issue which has/has not been addressed for the next version.” or “Call stack indicated that this crash is outside SketchUp code” (e.g. OpenGL, printer driver, system font rendering or the like) can be very useful on the user side when bug tracking.

Yes, I also understand that with my pipeline I am bypassing LayOut which is designed for the process. My workflow is based on a quick turnaround with scenes rendered to PNG images. Historically, I would of course not have created this workflow if it had not been working very well with previous versions of SketchUp.

I conclude either some minor glitch in texture handling has been introduced with SketchUp 2014/2015 or is only now manifesting (on scenes that have previously printed with no problems), or due to a combination of reasons we have passed a performance threshold and my system is now no longer up to the task.

25

Intel integrated graphics are not “reasonable”.

Understood. It might be time for a new system.

Yes, I had tried “Use maximum texture size” on/off along with “Hardware acceleration” on/off.

1 Like
26

This can happen in many situations. When you click send report a browser window will open and (might say “thank you”) and can have “more info” (or a “more info” link,) that gives a simple explanation or workaround or fix.

Ie, FYI:
http://www.bugsplatsoftware.com/Documents/what-is-the-optional-technical-support-response-feature/

Add, but not all errors will be linked to a “solution/explanation” in the database.

1 Like
27

Lawyers wont let us talk about futures.

28

There is, however, a big difference between saying you are aware of an issue and stating when you will fix it!

29

and your own license agreement too lol

I’m pretty sure that there are no legal implications announcing improved or new functionality of future versions… with many other companies permanently doing this.

30

See the first sentences of Apple vs PC for SketchUp - #21 by slbaumgartner I make it a practice to only use the ‘L’ word once in a thread. Twice only leads to trouble and bad things.

31

Hello sketch3d_de,are you actually running on the nVidia GTX980 card. I am about to buy - but I see another member has a lot problems with the drivers. My other alternative is the Quadro 4200 - but i get a lot of extra power in the GTX980 if it runs…

32

my GTX960 is running fine, under W7 Pro w/ recent SUP… but have not tested every functionality in every possible constellation.

GTX980 seems to be overkill, at least if yiu don’t wanna use the GPU for e.g. rendering purposes.

33

Thought I would post an update on this for record-keeping.

I have since upgraded to a more substantial system in order to make sure the crashes with leader text and printing are not just a graphics card issue. The enhanced system performance seemed to reduce crash likelihood but has not stopped it altogether.

I also moved to SketchUp 2016 - which shows the exact same behavior as 2015.

I was experiencing crashes during printing, but also sometimes during regular work - always in scenes with lots of leader text and dimensions, and sometimes leader text inside SketchUp would show as a corrupted texture.

I have since found, however, that crashes occur mainly if there are other applications active and open in the background.

Note we are not talking about 3D games or full-screen video running in the background. This could be Word, or perhaps the VLC player (playing audio). Keeping all other applications minimized while printing from SketchUp seems to greatly reduce the chances of this crash occuring.

I am not an OpenGL programmer, but it seems to me that SketchUp is not correctly securing handles to all its (text rendering) textures. So if during text rendering (to whatever screen buffer this is done) there is some other application open with an active drawing context, this might override some of SketchUp’s textures. Again, keeping other applications minimized helps.

1 Like
34

… or the other applications do use function calls or ressources in a way that interferes with SU.

Even browsers do use a hardware based acceleration nowadays.

35

FYI, having issues getting SU16 on windows 10 on a Surface Book to export section plane views to PDF. It is the kind of bug where it works sometimes and not others so I can’t justify the time required to work out exactly what is going on. Turning Open GL on/off doesn’t seem to make a difference.

EDIT: And yes, there is text/annotation in the scene