How to get the unofficial parts library to work in Mac OS

[SNIPE]

Hi,

This afternoon I've been looking at the cool 'unofficial parts library', they looked good on the website but when I opened them in Bricksmith I cept getting 'Bricksmith couldn't find all of the pieces in this file. The following are missing: s\xxxx.dat, s\xxx.dat', (those filenames are just an example) and realized why this was, it's because all of the file 'scripts' / contents when opened in a text editor have an '\' in them when it should be an '/', replacing all of them allows Bricksmith to find the subparts (located in the 's' directory).

Now, the problem was editing these thousands of files so I found a program called textmate ,when I went back the parts opened fine with no errors and had no changes to the file extention.

Here's how to fix this:

Download the unofficial parts library and extract the 'LDRAWUNF' directory to the bricksmith folder so you have the folders 'LDRAW' and 'LDRAWUNF' (LDRAW should already be there as it comes with bricksmith).

Find the 's' subfolder in 'LDRAWUNF'>'parts' and move it onto the desktop (make sure it is moved not just duplicated).
Download 'Textmate' then after installing. goto 'file', 'open'.
Locate the 'parts' folder in 'LDRAWUNF' and in the parts folder select all of the dat files and hit 'open'. (there should be nothing but .dat files in that folder since we moved the 's' folder).

Goto 'edit' and click 'find', then 'find in project'.

Type in the 'find' bar '\' (with no quotes) and hit 'find'.

In the 'replace' box, type in '/' (no quotes) and hit 'replace all'

Close the box and go to 'file', 'save all'.

Now go ahead and move the 's' folder back into the 'parts' folder in 'LDRAWUNF'

All or most parts should now return no errors when being opened.

***NOTE*** the 'parts' or 'p' folder containing official parts that comes with bricksmith should not be touched for this fix.

Note to mods, Im not sure what category of the Ldraw forum this should be located in.

[Allen Smith]

Hi Kris,

Bricksmith automatically converts '\' to the Mac path separator. You never need to manually edit Official or Unofficial part files to make them work in Bricksmith.

There is a help page in Bricksmith which explains how to correctly install Unofficial parts. It's a simple procedure. Please follow the directions under Help > Getting More Parts, and look under "The Easy Way". Here's the relevant exerpt:

1. Download the complete archive of parts in the tracker.
   
2. Rename the downloaded folder "ldrawunf" to "Unofficial"
   
3. Move the folder to LDraw/Unofficial
   

If you encounter any errors after using this method, it means you didn't put the Unofficial folder in the right place.

Thanks,
Allen

[SNIPE]

Ah ok that works now.

[Travis Cobbs]

Note also that if you have LDView installed and configured to use the same LDraw directory as Bricksmith, then opening a file that uses missing Unofficial parts in LDView will automatically download all the unofficial parts used, and I believe that those parts will then work fine in Bricksmith.