holding down ctrl while resizing is not doing what I expect

[tonylondon]

We're not trying to beat up on you. Honest

Every application has its own way of doing things. You just need to go with the flow and not fight it. If you constantly expect every program to work the same way (and it would be nice if they did) you will expend a lot of negative energy and be often frustrated.


Gary

Wish I'd said that!

Tony

[Seagull]

Well .... you learn something every day! I've never noticed that Gary.

Well, well, well, I finally beat egg at something. I found that out last year when I noticed everytime I resized, everything was going bonkos and that the curser shape had changed. Took me quite a while to figure it out. Well, well, well (forgive me egg, I'm just gloating).....Cheers....Frank

[metaeducation]

Xara and Illustrator and CorelDRAW use a bounding box (those small black squares, to intuitively resize an object. The middle squares resize the object non-proportionally, and the corner squares (if Lock Aspect Ratio is enabled (in the down position)) will scale the selectioin proportionally.

I was aware of the eight squares. (I almost always do non-aspect-locked resizes in two steps...adjust width, then height). It's just that I was stuck with the lock aspect ratio mode accidentally turned off, and I later couldn't find the setting among other "global options" in the menu system.

It seems like reflecting the lock status in a little check box in the Options->Scaling dialog would be a simple way to address this without breaking anything.

There is a way to tell if you are scaling proportionally or non-proportionally as you can see in the attached image. The cursor is a double sided arrow when proportional scaling is enabled (Locked aspect ration) and the four sided arrow when this feature is disabled.

It's cool that the cursor changes, I definitely like that. I actually thought the cursor was odd looking but I didn't make this connection. Still, I think that the status bar offers lots of helpful guidance on less central issues (such as resizing in multiples of the original object's size). So it would be nice if it said something about how to turn on/off the lock.

There is a certain logic and flow to every application and while we don't always agree with how Xara does things, it makes life so much eaiser to just say, it does things this way and so be it.

The only thing I was really confused about here was not being able to find the aspect ratio setting anywhere in the menus or options dialogs. Even while reading the help file, and reading the part on lock aspect ratio, I didn't make the connection that tiny lock affected anything besides typing numbers in those particular boxes. Thus, I was assuming that "Ctrl to constrain size" mentioned in the status bar was the modifier I was looking for...and that it was malfunctioning.