Why the Layout a separate program? It should be a part of sketchup!

[dwaynelord]

I send details sometimes when I’m not cursing the developers. Never gotten any response or feedback in 10 years of sending them. Have no idea who gets them or if they even read them.

Spellcheck… After identifying and correcting a spelling error, the red squiggly indicator line persists giving zero feedback if you corrected the spelling, which is compounded by the issue that it does not even give suggestions for correct spelling. Seriously bad implementation of this important feature that every other app has figured out.

Text boxes in general are awful in Layout. Very slow response times and sometimes have weird sizing behavior when clicking in to edit them. This is painful since, layout is the communication piece for SketchUp. Text should work smooth and seamless.

Raster… We use many materials based on textures with transparencies. If you choose one mode they frequently display as all black, in other modes you lose the fine resolution of vector. It’s hard to design for best of both worlds so you have to sacrifice one for the other.

For my team of about 40 designers, SketchUp is 50% of our work flow and Layout is the other 50% because it is how we deliver our designs to our customers.

Overall, it feels like Layout has seen little or no improvement in usability in years.

But hey, we have Ambient Occlusion and new icons! I wish those resources were used to improve the UX.

We use SketchUp because it is the easiest program we have found for sharing 3D spatial concepts quickly. It’s like the LIght-Brite of 3d drawing apps… We don’t use it for serious engineering, building planning activities.

[colin]

For interest, about bugsplats, I think that Barry proactively looks at the LayOut ones, but in general they are looked at if a customer starts a support case. Then any sent in bugsplats are linked to the case. Also, we check for what issues are coming the most, to see if the user descriptions help narrow down what was in common amongst those crashes.

Only rarely have I emailed someone out of the blue, having seen their bugsplat. Those times it would have been when we were looking for test cases, or sometimes I would have a suggestion I could make.

Once a fix or work around to a particular crash is figured out, the bugsplat report page is edited to let the person having that kind of crash know what is needed to stop the problem. So, it’s worth sending them in when they happen, the web page you’re taken to may have a solution to the problem.

[Barry]

I looked up crashes. from your user id, and there were 2 in 2022. Upon trying to open them, our external vendor’s software failed, so I emailed their support line - it’s likely that database needs a table repaired.

b

[Barry]

But you’ve hit me at a good time: I worked on LayOut with SketchUp’s original founder in alpha phase to production and until the Google sale to Trimble. I haven’t worked on LayOut since this past year, so I’m coming back to it and learning how we can push it forward. I’ll look fwd to helping however I can.

b

[napperkt]

Symbols (Layout Components), Multiple Page Sizes, Developer API, Finishing the New Engine. Updating the Line, Rectangle, Tools so they input-behave like in Sketchup (Click, Point, Enter Dimensions). Being able to Activate Section Cuts directly in Layout instead of Sketchup. Measures That have multiple in between points. I could go on, but these would be nice. For starters.

[renton555]

Hey while we’re discussing LayOut with devs in the room:

How about, 7 years in, we get a print and print preview interface that actually works?

We have a 2 page document here. 11x17, time to print. Let me make sure the document setup is correct for 11x17, landscape:

Welp, I hope not being able to change it from portrait to landscape doesn’t cause any issues! TIME TO PRINT.

Hmph, no preview available. LayOut 2024 is certainly no Word for Windows 1991. At least I can change the orientation to landscape here.

Great. (Now) TIME TO PRINT.

Well. That’s wrong in about 349 (per seat, annually) ways.

Let’s try again. PRINT

So, there’s literally no memory of settings in dialog boxes here. You have to manually set all the parameters. Every. Time.

Well, wait a minute. There’s actually a “page setup” (separate and not to be confused [at all] with “document setup.”).

I think we’re onto the solution here. Mmmhm let me just switch this to “Tabloid”.

TIME TO PRINT!

Mk, back to landscape and then go time.

TIME… TO… PRINT!

Well let’s just go back to the “drawing board”. LayOut is for 2D plans. Check. 2D Plans are typically meant for printing on paper. Check. Usually large format paper. Check. Document AND page set up are set to 11x17. Check and check. Wait a minute. There’s actually a print preview.

It took 34.9 tedious seconds to load two pages. No doubt there were dozens of faces and edges being rendered so it’s understandable.

The buttons and window are rather small. I guess no big deal. Beggars can’t be choosers I guess when the software costs more per year than all 5 GTA games when they came out combined (that’s $349 dollars for those without calculators). Let’s just maximize the window.

Okay the buttons are preposterously small. Nevermind. Let’s just look at all the pages. If I hover for 3.49 tedious seconds over each pixel-sized button, I can see that there’s one that shows both pages on the screen.

Okay apparently print preview renders dashed lines in “DMT mode”. Nevermind. No way to adjust the paper size or orientation on this screen so let’s just PRINT.

So printing in this way skips straight through the print dialog, so I assume it’s using the default settings. The ones that are wrong and can’t be changed because the print dialog forgets whenever you make changes to it. We’ve come this far I guess… P R I N T .

Still wrong, but at least the dashed lines printed correctly.

I’ve mostly shared this to be funny. I’m sure the apologists started coming out of the woodwork around step 4 to let me know that I’m supposed to export PDFs in LayOut, not print. That’s a workaround. Sometimes we just want to print one-off stuff and not go through the extra 30 tedious seconds that it takes to export a PDF, open that PDF in a different program, and print that PDF out.

Of course I know that the best policy is to just use export, and that’s what I always do, but, hilariously, I have just discovered that, in this particular file, I seem to have no PDF export option. This last GIF wasn’t even intentional. Literally just discovered a new bug in LayOut.

edit: I also know that if you go deeper into print settings and adjust the paper size, it will occasionally print correctly. But, again, it doesn’t remember the settings so you have to click 4 dialog boxes deep into the print settings each time you want to print something maybe sometimes right. It’s preposterous.

[Barry]

First, PDF not showing up: restart LayOut. It’s there on my versions of 2023, 2024… and I’m not sure why it didn’t show up on your screenshot.

Second. I whole heartedly agree, and I have since day one on Windows LayOut 1.0. The default printing & preview on Windows have always been bad, and we haven’t taken the time to dump them and do our own. This is on our board to do, but we are redoing both SketchUp and LayOut UI on Windows, and that work will certainly take precedence because we don’t want to write it and then throw it away.

Your best solution on Windows (for me as someone who’s used to NeXT Display Postcript and later Apple’s Display PDF and following technologies) has always been to export to PDF first, then deal with printing from there rather than waiting for Microsoft to fix their printing model. So let’s figure out why PDF isn’t an option for you right now.

b

[Barry]

I dug through some old emails, and it’s been reported that “View->Restore Default Workspace” fixed it in an older version.

b

[Barry]

And you do have Bluebeam PDF available from your print panel. Is that not working?

[renton555]

@Barry Thanks for humoring my snark.

First of all, “View->Restore Default Workspace” did the trick. Thanks also for that. I suspect I uncovered the bug when I did a bunch of rejiggering with tool bars.

I would have been able to print using bluebeam PDF but the issue was having to set the paper size and orientation each time manually whenever I’d go to print.