Scale an object by percent and preserve original size

[jonowi]

Hi

I want to be able to easily scale objects.

I've seen this topic, which explains how to use *=x%    e.g. entering "*=50%" in the W cell of the Transform box will shrink the Width of the object to 50% i.e. half the original size.

What I would like to be able to do is this, but whilst preserving the original size.  e.g. I'd like to shrink and object to 50%, then realise its a tad too small, so try again at 60%.  If I use the *=60% technique, I'll get something which is 60% of the new size, so really small, not 60% of the original size.  Obviously I can do the maths, or go from original to 50%, then up by 200% then down by 60% but this is a lot of faff and seems like it should be baked in.  Is this possible?

 

 

[Joachim_L]

Welcome to the Affinity forums @jonowi!

What would be so bad about undoing the latest step in history?

[jonowi]

Thank you Joachim.

Well it might have been many steps ago.   The use case I've just had is that I'm creating a document from some architect's drawings.  I've copied and pasted several parts of their plan plan (each aspect of the building) onto mine and resized them all. I've then continued to work on the document.  I now think they don't fit on the page as well as I would like, so want to rescale them. Say I now increase their scale to 120%. Then I want to copy another image from the architect's plans and have it scaled the same, I need to work out what to scale it by to match the other parts.

In writing this I see that it isn't as simple as I thought - I've copied elements from a PDF, so each image I've copied has come as a bunch of vectors which I've then grouped. What I'm asking for would mean preserving the original size of each of those vectors, so not as easy as if it were a raster image.

 

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by jonowi

[iconoclast]

In such cases, if you're not sure if what you will do next will be what you really want, you can make a snapshot.