V6 wish : Arrange layout tabs

[BrianM]

On occasion, there are many layouts required. This screenshot is a nest master for a yacht interior, where each cnc-cut sheet has its own layout printed out for the shop. The file grows with the job and keeping the layouts numerically or alphabetically arranged is desirable.

Any chance of the tabs being made dragable on the screen, in the dialog, or otherwise sorted?

[Ian]

Brian, I have also tried suggesting this feature (couple of times on the old newsgroup).
It seems so obvious to me, and highly useful if you end up with many views (or layouts).
A similar example is MS Excel, where you can drag the order of the worksheet tabs at the bottom of the screen.
But not only does Rhino not allow you to change the tab order, it randomises the tabs every so often, just to mess you up.

[BrianM]

I haven't come across a randomising problem in Rhino, but it has happened when saving to Acad, so the file had to be re-arranged in Acad before sending to the client.
Acad (2007) doesn't have the arrange feature either so its a matter of activating the lowest numbered layout (or Paperspace) and individually moving it to the end through the dialog, tediously followed by all the others. Anyone know of a better way to do this?

[stevebaer]

I haven't heard of any "randomness" issues before with layouts. If this is actually happening, I would like to understand how to repeat this and get it into our bugtracker right away, since that is potentially a serious flaw.

Rearranging tabs through dragging is on the Rhino wish list. What you are looking to do though sounds much easier if you just ran a script. Here's a python script that will sort the pages based on their names

import rhinoscriptsyntax as rs
import Rhino
import scriptcontext

def pagekey(page):
    return str.lower(page.PageName)

def SortPages():
    pages = scriptcontext.doc.Views.GetPageViews()
    pages = sorted(pages, key=pagekey)
    for i,page in enumerate(pages):
        page.PageNumber = i
    #there is a bug where the UI is not automatically updating
    #to match the changed numbers. Just turn the tabs off/on
    #to fix this for now
    rs.Command("-_ViewportTabs Hide")
    rs.Command("-_ViewportTabs Show")

SortPages()

[BrianM]

Thanks Steve, works a treat. I'll try to dig out the file with the problem layout tab.

[BrianM]

Hi Steve,

I've attached a file so you can repeat the loss of layout tab sort order when saving as dwg. I noticed while trying to repeat this on a blank drawing that creating a new layout from right click method, places the new layout at the left end of the tabs list, whereas the + button method correctly places the new layout at the right end of the tabs

V5 - Layout Sort Test.3dm(606.3 KB) V5 - Layout Sort Test.dwg(79.2 KB)

[sideprojek]

Hi,

May I suggess also that the tabs is probably not the best way to access each views, especially when there are a lot of them. Navigating through them is often a pain in the ... Rhino is not the only software that offer that kind of interface, Excel, AutoCAD are in the same bag.

Probably more something like Adobe After Effects would be good. The idea would be a king of "group tab" (a tab with a dropdownlist within). So by default, Rhino could show only 2 "group tabs", model views and layout views. In the model views tab the list could be "Top, Bottom, Left and Right" and the layout views tab could be empty as layout is not necessarily useful at startup.

I guess also that each group tab needs to be categorized. I see for now only 2 kinds which I already mentionned (group tab for models or layouts). So each group tab could be differentiated (icon for example) and maybe a plus sign (+) could be visible on each group tab.

There is my vision on this,

[stevebaer]

Ah ok, so this is a problem when going back and forth with dwg files. I'll file a bug report for this. Thanks. Once we have public access to the bugtracker, the issue could be found at
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-20985

[stevebaer]

Yes, we are thinking about other alternatives to displaying controls for working with multiple pages. Another possibility is a scrollable list of thumbnails similar to PDF viewer navigation.

[sideprojek]

Good, the only thing I can add about "other alternatives" is maybe a kind of guideline... no matter what is the new "controls", please keep in mind that user needs to have full control over it. For example, if there is "thumbnail" (which can be slower to generate, and sometime less meaningful than a simple title), the thumbnail needs to be an option (on / off).

Thanks

[lowell]

So far, I can't reproduce this.
When I open the Layout Sort Test.3dm attached here, the tabs are sorted.
When I save it as dwg and open it in AutoCAD the sort order is the same. - There are 2 tabs named P12-14 in the 3dm file and one of them gets changed to Layout16 in Acad, but other than that, the order is the same.
When I read the dwg file back into Rhino, the order stays the same.

I can see that the order is wrong in your dwg file, but I can't duplicate making it that way.

[BrianM]

I've just re-tried the example and get the same results as you, so the glitch has disappeared. Must have been unique to me, thanks for investigating Lowell.

[mortenengel]

great idea.