Flat Cigar Paper Boxes InDesign CS Linear scaling

Flat Cigar Paper Boxes InDesign CS Linear scaling

 

Lines include straight lines, object frames, rectangles and path lines.

 

Linear control is a problem we often encounter in layout production. In particular, how to correctly use the zoom function is something we must master.

 

The zoom function doesn't look difficult, but in practice it can make mistakes if you are not careful. In use, we should pay attention to the following points:

1) Try to use the zoom tool in the InDesign toolbar
Most people like to scale manually, but this habit may not be very good because it is difficult to accurately control the line type. So we recommend that you use the zoom tool as much as possible.

 

The zoom tool operates in two ways. Whether you are working with a single line or a group of lines with other objects, you can do it as follows.

 

One is to select the Zoom tool, click a reference point on the layout, and then as the mouse moves up and down left and right, the line (or other objects) will do vertical and horizontal scaling. Or hold down the shift key and scale.

 

The second way is to first select the line that needs to be scaled, press the scaling tool twice, fill in the proportion that needs to be scaled in the dialog box that appears, and the selected line will be scaled according to the specified proportion.

 

The above methods are discussed in various tutorials, and we will not elaborate here.

 

The focus here is on the control of the linear width (i.e. thickness). We want to use the "Scale Line" option from the extension menu in the arrow to the right of the Line bar.

First determine the basic width of the line type. Such as: 2 mm.

 

If you want the line width to remain the same during line scaling, do not click the "Scale Line" option. Then scale the operation. This way, no matter what scale you scale the line to, the line width is still 2 mm.

 

If you want the width of the line to change as you zoom. Then select the line to scale, and then select the "Scale line" option. Then zoom in and out. For example, zoom 200% of the original size, that is, double the size.

Enlarged information is displayed in the toolbar

Pay attention! After scaling with Zoom Line selected, you will notice that the width of the lines on the screen does change. However, in the information in the Line type toolbar, the line width is still 2 mm, but the value is 200% in the scale bar. We shall come to the reasons below.

 

2) Manual scaling

Many people also use manual scaling in special situations. The manual operation is as follows:

Select the line or object that you want to scale, and eight small hollow squares will appear around the object. You can use the solid arrow tool to hold down any of the small squares according to the needs of scaling, and do horizontal vertical or overall scaling.

 

If you want to scale equally, hold down the shift key and drag the object in the four corner squares.

 

But if you want to control the width of the line, there will be some problems. The problem is that the "Scale Line" option in the Extensions menu in the Line bar does not work when scaling manually. So, what if we need to change the width (thickness) of the line? There are two cases:

When scaling a single line, the manual method is not able to control the width of the line, no matter how scaled, the width of the line remains unchanged.

 

After grouping lines containing other objects, if you want to change the width of the lines while scaling, you can control the width of the lines in a special way. This approach is:

Hold down the Apple key (if you want to scale horizontally and vertically, hold down the shift key at the same time), then use the solid arrow to select the eight small hollow squares around the group of objects to scale.

Enlarged information is displayed in the toolbar

When the operation is complete, we will see on the screen that the width of the line has changed according to your zoom ratio. The linear information bar in the toolbar still shows the same situation after using the zoom tool to change the width of the line. That is, the line width is displayed unchanged, while the zoom ratio is changed.

 

3) Set the actual width of the line after scaling

As mentioned above, after scaling the width of the line, the width of the line does not change, only the scaling ratio has changed, as in the example above, the line width is still 2 mm, but the value in the scaling ratio bar is 200%. Now, the line width is not actually 2 mm, but: 2 mm X 200%= 4 mm.

 

What if we want to display the actual width directly, or if we want to change the width of the line again now?
Step 1: Select a scaled line, or select a group of objects containing lines;

 

Step 2: Click the arrow on the right of the line toolbar, and we will find that a command "Restore scaling to 100%" has been added to the menu bar.

 

Step 3: Select the "Restore scale to 100%" command.

 

The purpose of this step is to zero out the scale, and whatever scale you scaled to before is now viewed as 100%.

At this point, we look at the linear toolbar and see that in the information in the Linear toolbar, the linear width is 4 mm and the value in the scale bar is 100%.

 

This is the actual width of the scaled line. Now, we can easily observe or change the actual width of the line in the Linear toolbar