how does size change happen?

[ivytrellis]

I did a little fleur de lis design on scal2. wanting to keep the same image size, I saved the project. later when I went back and retrieved it to use again...the size of the image had changed?? I tried and tried and couldn't even resize to the original I'd saved. tried not using the "keep proportions" and changing W and H individually...still couldn't replicate.
Does anyone know how/why this happened to the saved image? what did I do wrong? thanks, rosa

[kimz1959]

I'd like to know this too. I have opened svg files that will take up the whole mat size so much so that I can't get to the arrow in the corner of the desdign to shrink it down. Is there a way to prevent that from happening???? One I can reference right offhand is "comfort chairs" by einnej

[Sweetness4713]

Did anyone try using the zoom out button ??? I know when I would click off sometime and then click back on my mat would be zoomed in... Not the mat size but the view mat size...

[jasenj1]

The problem with SVGs is that the units used are arbitrary. So in the SVG document you may have something that says "draw a line from 1,0 to 4,5". "1" what? "5" what? Inches? centimeters? meters? SVG doesn't know or care. Your drawing program (or SCAL) is responsible for translating between SVG units and real world units. This translation between internal SVG units and real world units is typically expressed in dots per inch, or dpi. Inkscape typically uses 90 dpi, and Illustrator uses 100 dpi. But you can change those values; 300 dpi is another common size to work in.

What does all this mean for SCAL? When it opens an SVG it has to guess what real world size the SVG units represent. There is a preference to switch between 100 dpi for Illustrator and 90 dpi for Inkscape. But the file you open could use a wide variety of dpi values. So SCAL could quite easily guess wrong and draw the image the wrong size.

This isn't too big a problem in SCAL. You can use the resize command in SCAL to quickly fix the size of an object.

I hope that explanation helps relieve any frustration you may be having with SCAL. It's not really SCAL's fault, it's just the way things are.

- Jasen.

[ivytrellis]

WOW Jasen! now you've left no doubt that SCAL is my new second language!
appreciate the info...and at least I know it's not something I did to make it all quirky!
thanks, rosa