Constraints: scale object proportionally with parent height

[kaffeeundsalz]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to figure out how to make an image scale with the height of its artboard while always maintaining the image's aspect ratio. I've tried different approaches in Designer, some of them kind of worked, but none of them exactly. Here's what I found:

• Constraining the image to the top and bottom makes it scale with the artboard but not maintain its aspect ratio, meaning the image will get distorted along the y axis when changing the height of the artboard.
• Using Min Fit makes the image scale with the artboard and maintain its aspect ratio, but only when decreasing height. With height increasing, the image won't enlarge with the artboard, leaving whitespace at the top and bottom.
• Using Max Fit makes the image scale with the artboard and maintain its aspect ratio, but only when increasing height. With height decreasing, the image won't scale down with the artboard, clipping the image at its top and bottom.

Please see this video where I try each of these approaches in the above order:

A workaround that I've found is to start with insanely large dimensions for the image and artboard before activating Min Fit and then bringing everything back to its normal size. This way, the image always needs to scale down to min fit as long as the artboard's height doesn't exceed a ceratin range.

Is there actually no way to constrain an object to a container while maintaining the object's aspect ratio? Or am I overlooking something really obvious here? I know something very similar has been asked in the forums before, but the thread doesn't answer the question appropriately.

Thanks in advance for your help!
kaffeeundsalz

[Dan C]

Hi kaffeeundsalz

Are you only looking to change the height of the Artboard, or can you change both the height and width?

If so, you can apply vertical constraints to the placed image, then scale the Artboard using the corner handle with the Shift modifier held - this will scale the image in relation to the Artboard and retain it's aspect ratio -

[kaffeeundsalz]

Hi @Dan C,

thanks for your reply! My question is about keeping the aspect ratio of a child object when changing only one dimension of its container, in this case the height. I know everything scales proportionally when you use proportional scaling in the first place, but that's not what I'm trying to achieve here. The scaling I want to apply is exacly the one that's shown in my video.

All the best
kaffeeundsalz

[kaffeeundsalz]

To generalise my question even more: I'm looking for a way to have a child object automatically scaled proportionally when the parent object is scaled non-proportionally. As can be seen in my video, it kind of works with the Min Fit and Max Fit options, but only in one direction (either scaling up or scaling down).

[Dan C]

Thanks for confirming that, unfortunately I don't believe this is currently possible - through all of my testing I have found the same results as yourself, using Min/Max Fit.

I'll log an improvement with our devs now to see if we can't implement an option that would make this possible in the future  

[kaffeeundsalz]

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

I'll log an improvement with our devs now to see if we can't implement an option that would make this possible in the future  

That really kind, thank you!