Scaling error

[Gymagery International]

While scaling down multiple selected vector objects, I got an error that in effect said 'cannot scale objects because it would make them too small to be useful.' Has anyone else encountered this error and is there a way to fix it? I can't believe Illustrator wouldn't scale anything down no matter how small it made it.

thanks

[Teri Pettit]

You will get this error message if a Uniform scale is attempted, and the requested scale factor would make some object that originally had both height and width at least 1/1000 of a point have both height and width less than 1/1000 of a point.

The reason is that when writing out files, we only write out coordinates to 3 decimal places, that is, we round them to the closest 1/1000 pt. So if you scale an object that small, all of its coordinates will be written out as the identical values, essentially the same as if you had selected the entire object and did an Average in both dimensions. Since all the points would become identical, it would be impossible to ever scale it back up to the original shape.

One might wonder, if Illustrator allows collapsing all the anchor points to the same location using the Average command, why doesn't it allow it using the Scale tool? The answer is that if someone asks to Average all the points of an object both horizontally and vertically, they are explicitly requesting a change to the shape. But if they are trying to uniformly Scale an object, generally the intention is that it maintain its shape, and change only its size. So an alert comes up if the object originally has some non-degenerate shape, and the scale factor would be so small that no shape information could be preserved.

[Teri Pettit]

Addendum addressing the question of a "way to fix it":

The only situation I can envision in which this restriction might be a problem would be if you had a large complex illustration, in which some objects were very small in both dimensions but zero in neither (say, some 1/2 pt diameter poppy seeds on a bun in a larger than life-size picture of a plate of food), and you wanted to scale that whole picture down by a significant factor, say to 1/500 the original size. In that case, you might not care that the poppy seeds got so small they effectively disappeared and could never reappear no matter how much you scaled back up the whole reduced picture.

If you have this kind of illustration that you want to scale down by a large amount, the best thing to do is to simplify it by removing the tiny objects before scaling it down, since this will improve preview and print performance and reduce the file size. Ideally you would not want to waste time and space on objects too small to see. But if it is impractical to remove the tiny details before scaling, say because they are scattered around the artwork and are not collected in a layer or anything else that makes them easy to select, then a workaround is to use two non-Uniform scales. First scale by 100% horizontally and your desired scale factor vertically, and then scale by 100% vertically and your desired scale factor horizontally.

[Doug Katz]

Jeez! What an incredibly clear and sensible answer!

[Steven Sharlein]

Wish more people would articulate the answers this way! We'd probably run out of questions, then there would be no need for this forum!!

[Teri Pettit]

Steve,

There's always someone new asking the same questions, and few people use the Search features. I can't count the number of times I've explained how to create your own custom Libraries for swatches, symbols, brushes and styles, or how to keep the eyedropper tool from applying color at the container level on groups and text objects.

[Mark Durgee]

> can't count the number of times I've explained how to ...

Some of the other forum hosts use boilerplates minimize the typing.