SketchUp Units and Locale

The purpose of this mini-library is to provide easy conversions of Area and Volume within SketchUp as well as dealing with user environment locale.

Lengths

SketchUp provides the Length class to format internal units into strings representing the unit in the current model's unit and user locale. It also extends the String class with methods to convert strings from any SketchUp unit and user's locale into Length objects.

SketchUp's Shortcomings

Locale Setting

What SketchUp lacks is methods to convert regular numbers to and from numeric objects to strings in the user's locale. For instance 1.5.to_s will return a string "1.5" even if the user locale users comma as decimal separator - even though 1.5.mm.to_s will return "1,5mm". Similarly, when the user locale uses comma "1,5".to_f will return 1.0.

Areas and Volumes

While there is Sketchup.format_area that will take square inches and format into model units there is no methods for the reverse. Volume is completely missing. On top of that, there is no easy way to define area or volume in any other unit than square inches - similar to 15.mm etc.

Unit and Locale Library Design

This library is intentionally not modifying or extending base classes in order to avoid potential clashes with other libraries and any future version updates. Because of this you have to use syntax which is slightly more awkward, such as Area.mm2( 500 ) instead of 500.mm2.

The reason for not using the most elegant syntax is the shared nature of the SketchUp Ruby API environment. This is explained in more detail in the article Golden Rules of SketchUp Plugin Development.

Module Wrapper

For the same reason as above the code provided is wrapped in an Example module in order to indicate to developers who wish to make use of the code to wrap everything up in their own namespace.

Improve and Share

Please make comments, suggestions and improvements to this library. :)