Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Scaling objects in InDesign CS3

The way that objects are scaled with the Control panel and the Transform panel has changed in InDesign CS3.

If you look in either of these panels, you will see four important fields: width and height fields (indicated by a W: and H:, and scale x/y percentage fields (next to the width and height fields, with fields displaying 100%). There are three important things to remember here:

1. You may enter a measurement in inches, picas, millimeters or centimeters in any of these fields (width, height or scale x/y). You may also enter a scale percentage in any of these fields (width, height or scale x/y). Just enter an i, ", p, pt, c, mm, or % after the value you enter.

2. You may enter mathematical expressions into any of these fields. So you can enter *5 to make the object five times larger, or /2 to make it 50% smaller, or +1i to make it 1 inch larger.

3. Values entered into the width/height fields will cause the selected frames(s) to scale, but not the contents (text or graphics) of the frames, nor the weight of any strokes applied to the frames. Values entered into the scale fields will scale the frames as well as the contents of the frames and the stroke weights.

3 comments:

rs said...

THANK YOU! took me 1/2 hour to figure out this change in cs3.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU! I second that last comment. I was in a crunch trying to figure out this program this morning. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I was totally stumped on this and you've just cleared it up for me. Bless you!