Measure
Read a distance.
Keyboard: T
How to use it
- Click two points and read the distance between them.
- It leaves a guide behind to snap to - a point, or a dashed line, depending on where you pulled it from.
Guides
What it leaves depends on where you pulled it from - SketchUp's rule:
| Pulled from | What you get |
|---|---|
| Along an edge - a point in from a corner, say | A guide point where it landed, and no line. A dashed line lying on the edge you measured along marks nothing. |
| Off an edge, into the face | A guide line parallel to that edge, at the distance you measured, and a point. |
| From a corner, or in mid air | A line across the run, and a point. There is no edge to be parallel to. |
The line is dashed and has no ends - it runs the width of the drawing. Where that guide crosses an edge is a place the cursor will snap to - which is the whole reason for laying one. Two guides crossing each other make a point as well.
Guides belong to the tape: it lays them, and it is the only thing that erases one. The select tool, the eraser and the move tool leave guides alone, so a click aimed at a line never takes the guide lying on it, and a swipe of the eraser never takes a guide you meant to keep.
What it leaves behind
Ctrl, with the tape in hand, cycles what a measurement drops: both the dashed line and the point, the point on its own, the dashed line on its own, or nothing at all. Both is what you get unless you change it, and the bar along the bottom says which mode you are in every time you press it. A 1" mark in from the end of a line rarely wants a dashed line running the width of the drawing with it - that is what the point-only mode is for.
Erasing a guide
With the tape in hand, right-click a guide. The menu says what it will take before it takes anything - Erase This Guide Point or Erase This Guide Line - and the guide is lit while you read it. A point is looked for before the line it sits on, so aiming at the point gets the point. Erasing a guide line leaves the points on it: they were laid on their own and are erased on their own. Ctrl+Z brings it back.
The same menu has Hide Guides - put them all away, still in the drawing - and Clear Guides, to throw them all away. Both are on the select tool's right-click too.
A guide is never moved. Lay a new one where you want it, and keep or erase the old one.
Keeping a measurement
The tape is finished the moment it has measured - the second point ends
it. If the run was worth writing on the drawing, /keep turns the
last one into a dimension. It is a command rather than another keypress
because a keypress on a tool that has already finished is how a dimension
turns up an hour later that nobody asked for.
See also
- Dimensions - a measurement written on the drawing rather than a guide
- The protractor - the same idea for an angle
- Snapping - what a guide is for once it is there