Would like to be able to scale by area (split)

[mpstaton]

Would love to scale by area, rather than scale through width and height.  

I have irregular shapes. They represent some number, usually a population.  I need to be able to scale by area rather than by width and height. So, if 3 million people live in some city, and that city is represented by a random shape, and what I am proposing affects half the population, I want to scale the whole shape area by 50%.  Using width and height doesn't have the right visual effect.  

[MikeTO]

This is kind of a cool idea. I've made infographics with these sorts of things. I generally just eyeballed them, making the circles 50%-ish smaller.

If it doesn't become a feature then maybe when scripting is available one of us could write a script to do this for simple shapes.

[MEB]

Hi @mpstaton,
Thanks for your feedback. If you don't mind a question, why an irregular shape for that type of representation? Cities with similar population values will be much harder to decipher/read with irregular shapes than with regular/comparable ones. Is there any other uses cases where this can be useful?

[Old Bruce]

9 hours ago, mpstaton said:

Would love to scale by area, rather than scale through width and height.  

I have irregular shapes. They represent some number, usually a population.  I need to be able to scale by area rather than by width and height. So, if 3 million people live in some city, and that city is represented by a random shape, and what I am proposing affects half the population, I want to scale the whole shape area by 50%.  Using width and height doesn't have the right visual effect.  

Just a bit of math required. The width and height multiplied by the Square Root of the increase or decrease.

[Return]

Why not just type in the percentage in the transform field for either width or height and use the lock aspect ratio.

[Old Bruce]

8 minutes ago, Return said:

Why not just type in the percentage in the transform field for either width or height and use the lock aspect ratio.

If you want the area to be 50% then typing in 50% in the W and H fields give you 25% of the area.

[MikeTO]

6 minutes ago, Return said:

Why not just type in the percentage in the transform field for either width or height and use the lock aspect ratio.

If it were a circle, a circle 2 inches in diameter would have an area of 3.14 while a circle 1 inch in diameter would have an area of 0.79. Typing a percentage into width or height won't scale the area by 50% and the OP wants to create things like population circles on a map or infographic.

A circle is easy to calculate so maybe someday one of us can create a script for that and perhaps regular polygons but calculating the area of irregular shape requires breaking it down into regular shapes.

[Return]

2 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

If you want the area to be 50% then typing in 50% in the W and H fields give you 25% of the area.

Either not both

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Return said:

Either not both

But with a locked aspect ratio, if you change W by 50% you also change H by 50%

Here's a 2" square, where I put *50% in the W Transform box, and got a 1" square, which has 25% of the area.

 

[Old Bruce]

Area = H x W.
Square root of .5 is 0.707106781186548

1 square metre is 1 x 1
   or .5 x 2

1/4 square metre is .5 x .5 
   or .25 x 1

1/2 square meter is 0.707106781186548 x 0.707106781186548
   or 0.353553390593274 x 1.414213562373096

[Return]

Okay thanks for reminding me that I sucked at math in school and apparently still do.😩