Custom Rulers for scaling
It would be great to have the option of creating custom scaled rulers.
I'd like to be able to just tell the rulers "From this point to this point on the artboard is x-pixels" and have the ruler scale.
When I design something for a 1080p screen, I like to put 2-up on a letter size page for discussion and markup with clients. So I design in a 2-up environment and end up with a massive amount of math to get things sized right.
Howard
shared this idea
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Howard and others — do you think of it as of a document-level setting, or perhaps it should be applied to a layer, or an artboard, or a group?
Where do you expect to edit this value? -
Anonymous
commented
I frequently draw to scale. But with Illustrator I have to either keep a chart that I have created that gives me the conversion sizes for different scales or I have to draw at 100% then scale the finished drawing down for use. We need something that is the equivalent of the old three sided engineers scale. The feature needs to allow you to use actual numbers but draw to the selected scale. This could be a preference setting that allows you to set the drawing scale like 3/4" = 1'. By setting my preference to this setting I could enter the length of a line to be 42" and the onscreen line would be at scale (2.625") selecting on object would show its intended size (42").
To take this a step further, another cool feature would be to have a "Show measurements" option. You could select a line or an object turn on show measurements and illustrator would place the appropriate brackets with the measurement. This could have preferences for how the measurements are to be displayed (font, size, line style and thickness, etc.) -
Joshua Anderchek
commented
One of the reasons many people still use CorelDraw for drawing is that they can set a specific drawing scale to the rulers. This is a feature that is still missing from Illustrator and would go a long way to open up the market to designers who use Illustrator as a design program, and finally get people away from Corel. The current option is to constantly draw objects at full-scale (which may be too big for Illustrators limits) or use a calculator/scale converter, which adds significant production time. Currently this option is only available through a very expensive 3rd party download.
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Custom scale, yeah. This is what is actually done in a form of Large Canvas, but they could have made it better, with a ratio a user can control and not hardbound. I vote for this
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Chip
commented
Be able to define a custom ruler, i.e. 1 in = 100 ft. All drawing would be performed using the alternate dimensions. In the case of the example, an 8.5 x 11 inch artboard would be 850 ft x 1100 ft, so when you draw a 300 ft x 300 ft square it would print out 3 in x 3 in. This is especially helpful when drawing floor plans.
