Scale Graphic and Frame in CS3 with Shortcuts

David Blatner

6

Juliana wrote:

Why is it that in CS3 I can no longer rescale/resize both the image frame and the content using the option-command-< and option-command-> keystrokes? (Now all the keystroke does is resize the frame.) This is a shortcut that I’ve come to count on, and not having it available it slowing me down tremendously.

Sometimes when we get an email from someone, I’m sure — absolutely sure — that we have covered this before in a post, and the person just didn’t try hard enough to find it. This was one of those times, but upon searching myself, I quickly realized that I think we forgot to write this one up properly! The subject came up back in a discussion in the show notes of Episode 56 and sort of in this post, but that’s hardly easy to find! So, with embarassment, here’s the deal:

Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, changed the way the keyboard shortcuts for scaling worked between CS2 and CS3. As Juliana wrote, Command-Option-period or comma (or Ctrl-Alt-period or comma, in Windows) used to scale both the frame and the graphic inside by 5%. To scale it by 1%, you could press Command/Ctrl-period or comma.

However, in CS3, these shortcuts now only resize the frame. Or, if you select the graphic with the Direct Selection tool, it will scale the image without the frame.

Fortunately, Sandee Cohen came to the rescue. Sandee was actually upset by a different sort of change in CS3: That scaling with these shortcuts used to scale by exactly 1% or 5%, and if you scaled an image from 100mm to 105mm, you could then scale it back down to 100mm with the opposite shortcut. But now, in CS3, the image would scale up to 105mm, and then down to 99.75mm (which is 5% less than 105mm).
(Editor’s note: I personally don’t remember InDesign ever scaling up and down in even increments, but Sandee does, and that’s what counts.)

Anyway, Sandee wrote four little scripts with some help from some scripters (I don’t recall whom) that fixed both these problems! The scripts scale up or down by 1% or by 5%. If you run the script while the object is selected with the Selection tool, both the frame and the image get scaled. Yay! If you select the image with the Direct Selection tool and use the script, it increases/decreases by even increments, so you can scale up by 5% three times to get to 115% and then scale down three times to an even 100% again.

As a bonus, if you have Adjust Scaling Percentage chosen in Preferences, you scale the frame and content by even increments of the original size (105%, 110%, 115%, etc.). Unfortunatey, I don’t like having this preference turned on because of what happens to text scaling, the old parentheses come back. But as Anne-Marie pointed out, if you scale images frames mostly (and scale text frames very infrequently) then this could be the ticket for you!

However, no one wants to run these kinds of scripts by double-clicking on them in the Scripts panel. That would be really annoying. Instead, assign shortcuts to them by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, and then choosing Scripts from the Product Area pop-up menu. Assign any reasonable shortcut to each of the four scripts, and you’re good to go!
You can find Sandee’s scripts on her vectorbabe web site. Thank you, Sandee, for making those available!