Troubleshooting

Here are some suggestions on what to do if things don't work properly.

Ruby problems

Menu commands don't appear

If the MarathUp commands aren't appearing in the Plugins menu, and you don't get any error message when launching Sketchup, or you get a message about not being able to find a file, then the script files probably aren't in the right place. The file Marathon.rb and the folder Marathon need to be directly in the Sketchup Plugins folder, not in a sub-folder of it. Also, if you have more than one version of Sketchup installed, make sure you've put them in the Plugins folder of the right version.

If there's some other problem, you can get more information by opening the Ruby console using Window>Ruby Console and typing the following command into the box at the bottom:

load "Marathon.rb"

If there was a script crash, the Ruby console will show an error message and a traceback showing where the script was executing at the time. If you're not into Ruby programming then this probably won't help you directly, but if you send it to me at the address below it'll help me debug the script.

A menu command doesn't do anything

If the Ruby script for one of the MarathUp menu commands crashes, you probably won't see anything happen. The first thing to do in this situation is to save your work and try quitting and restarting Sketchup. Occasionally the Ruby scripting system seems to go insane and start doing weird things, and a restart usually fixes that.

If the problem persists, open up the Ruby console window using the Window>Ruby Console command, and then repeat the operation you were trying to perform. If there is a script crash, you will get an error message and traceback.

Copy the contents of the Ruby console window and email it to me, attaching the Sketchup model you were using if any (after purging unused textures), and a description of what you were trying to do at the time. My email address is

greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz

Sketchup crashes

Although it's usually pretty reliable, Sketchup itself seems to be prone to crashing occasionally under heavy use, so saving your work frequently is recommended.

The process of importing large numbers of textures and creating texture libraries from them seems to be particularly likely to cause it problems. You may find it helpful to create reduced-resolution versions of the texture images for importing into Sketchup. This will also help to keep the sizes of your Sketchup files down, since all the textures used by a model are stored uncompressed in the .skp file.

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