Cutlister is a Google SketchUp Plugin that automates the creating of cut lists for your woodworking project. A cut list is a table of parts used to make up a piece of cabinetry or furniture (such as a door, wall end, back or finished end).
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Nov 09, 2011 This tutorial requires you to download Ruby scripts AND drag those files into you 'plugins' folder for your sketchup application. To download the ruby script.
This plugin also exports layouts for your sheet and part goods, allowing you to visualize exactly how much material you will need and how to cut it out, thus saving you material on your next project (Layouts are currently not implemented!).
This plugin is specifically designed for cabinet makers and woodworkers, but could also apply to other industries and applications.
Cutlister takes all the selected entities in your model and creates a cut list for those parts
The plugin exports these items in a variety of lists types and formats.
You can choose from outputting an HTML page, a CSV file (for importing into programs like Microsoft Office and Apple iWork Numbers), printing labels (only Avery 5366 labels currently) and, eventually, other formats. If there is a format you are interested in using, please fork the Github repository or create a case on the GitHub issue tracker to add it in. There is no guarantee that I will get around to it, but if I think it is a good idea, I may end up doing it.
This plugin was designed to be extendable, allowing you to add your own output formats, cut lists and renderers. This means you could generate custom cut lists for your own particular needs without changing anything in the current code (more on this below).
Installation
Copy the file
Cutlister.rb file and the Cutlister directory into your SketchUp plugin directory:
On a Mac it is usually here:
On Windows it should be here:
.. where
X is the version of SketchUp you are running.
Once the plugin is copied over, restart SketchUp and the plugin should be working.
You will see a right-click context menu item called 'Cutlist selection' as well as a menu entry under 'Plugins' named 'Cutlist model'.
Usage
To use Cutlister, just select the items in your model you want to cut list and right-click (context click) on them and select 'Cutlist Selection', or use the item in the 'Plugins' menu, or the Toolbar item.
In order to get Cutlister to work right in your models, you may need to make some changes to your workflow. Below is the general work flow for getting Cutlister to work as expected:
Once your models is setup, you can begin to cut list.
Once you have the Cutlister popup menu open, set your options and then click 'Export' to generate your cut list.
You can choose the Format of the export, which will output the cut list into different formats. Currently there are there choices:
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Next, you can select the List Type you want to export which controls how the data is structured in the cut list:
You can choose to Show only Sheet Goods, Solid Stock, Hardware or any combination of them.
The Sheet Goods list is a comma separated list of material names that match materials in your model. If the material name is in this list, it will be grouped as a Sheet Good part. The field is case-insensitive, meaning if you input 'mdf', it would match any material in your model named 'mdf', 'MDF', 'mDf', or any combination of lowercase and capital letters. This field also allows you to have materials that contain spaces, dashes and underscores (e.g. 'Shop Ply', 'Pre-finish Maple', 'peruvian_walnut', etc...).
The Solid Stock list is the same as the Sheet Goods list above, but it instead labels parts as Solid Stock. The same rules apply for items in the list. Generally, solid stock is considered to be anything cut out of lumber.
Extending Cutlister
Cutlister is designed to be extensible. This means that you can create new renderers, output formats and cut lists based on your needs.
If you wanted to export an XML file, for example, you could create a sub-class of the
Renderer class (which is found in renderers.rb ) to construct your XML file and then create a sub-class of the Cutlist class (in cutlist.rb ) to format the cut list output to work with XML.
Once you sub-class
Renderer or Cutlist , your custom renderer/cutlist will show up in the 'Format' and 'List Type' select boxes in the UI once you restart SketchUp.
See the file
Cutlister/extensions/ folder for an example of how to do this.
Credits
Cutlister was inspired by the CutList project by:
It was completely re-written from the ground up and uses only a few small parts of the original code.
A few differences of Cutlister from CutList are as follows:
Notes & Caveats
This plugin is currently under heavy development and some parts are not functional yet.
One major note is that Cutlister does not do 'layouts' currently. The original CutList has support for something called 'layout' which allows you to output your cut list as a printable panel layout that you can use to visualize how your parts will fit on a sheet of plywood or other material.
Since Cutlister was completely re-written, it must be built from the ground up, and the layout feature has not yet been integrated.
I am planning on implementing the layout features as soon as the cut listing parts are stable and I have determined the best way to implement the feature so that it is flexible for multiple uses.
Contributing, Feedback & Bug Reports
If you want to contribute to this project, please fork Cutlister at the Github repository and send me pull requests if you want to see your change integrated.
If you have any feedback or comments, feel free to send me an email at [email protected].
If you find bugs or have a feature request, please add them at the GitHub issue tracker.
License
Cutlister is licensed under an MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.
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