Scaling issue workaround?

[Egg Bramhill]

I'm sure it's down to the software that created the vector shapes originally. Scaling with aspect locked works as expected, but scaling without aspect locked in the horizontal plane creates odd behavior. The left & right side of the group widen but there's a middle section that remains in the middle unscaled.

To stop this behavior, ungroup and then apply a softgroup (as someone suggested earlier). This now works in an expected manner.

[mikeymopar]

ermm...Egg....
unless you have a different example.xar than Rik or i that's how it already stretches. no need to ungroup then softgroup. can stretch it already horizontally with everything completely being scaled horizontally. that's why Rik and I (and i think even Fred) were at a loss. i don't see it at all stretching the way it is for you how it was downloaded and opened. what changed ????

also, instead of having a million shapes to create the walls, just make 2 rectangles, different widths for exterior and interior walls. paste and rotate as many as needed and place them snapping to corners/edges. and then when finished just select all walls and combine>add shapes. if any editing needs to be done then use shape editor to delete nodes.

just thinking to simplify the entire process...

edit: hmm. reading Fred's post over i see it happens if you select the group itself from the page and layer gallery only instead of just marquee selecting it all in the workspace. and then it only happens grabbing the handles. if you enter in a value at the top for the width then everything still stretches horizontally (including the middle parts)

[mikeymopar]

ah-ha. it's also a "web" document which is known to have issues stretching things horizontally only. if you change it to "print" then you can select the group in page and layer gallery and it'll properly stretch everything by just the middle handle too. if you wanna keep it "web" template then hold alt down while dragging the middle handle horizontally to keep everything exactly as the example.xar file is and to stretch everything horizontally by selecting it in the page and layer gallery

project should be started using any template other than web page or photo

[Egg Bramhill]

I understand what you're saying Mikey, but that odd scaling is not a function of Xara vectors, web or print document. It's down to the creation software

[Rik]

Tell you what I've found.
(Unless someone else has found it already!)

If I marquee select everything (which includes the eyes), then things perform the way they should.
But...
If you simply select the drawing (which is grouped), then you get the problem feklee is talking about.