I’m very often in a situation where i’d like to scale horizontally right after i scaled something vertically. That means i have to cut and paste the values from one field to the other one in the palette. That’s at least 5 actions (click in the field, select the input, cut, tab to next field, paste) or more if the other value is not 0%.
May i suggest adding a “switch values” button to the scale palette?
Or maybe clicking the up/downscale icon while holding alt could reverse the values?
Or am i just missing/misusing something?
Select outlines and see info box, where you will find the size of selection. If the width of the selection was 342 and you want to scale it by 20% for example, you type 342*1.2
Note that the percentage in the info box and palette yield very different results (measure both and you will see which one is wrong. Don’t use that one).
I was aware that i can calculate in the info box as well as up/down+shift+cmd the values. But that doesn’t replace what the transformation palette does. It does different math, it’s clickable, it remembers the values i want scaling to be done with. You’re all suggesting doing transformations in the info box. Is it considered superior for some reason?
If you are happy with the result, then of course you can use whichever you want; if you ask me, that corner of the palette is collecting digital dust. Please try drawing a 100*100 square, scaling it by a quarter (125%) with both ways, and let me hear if the palette’s scaling makes sense.
I see where this could be an issue as the calculations are nowhere near intuitive but they are very quick to apply, repeat and reverse – it’s a fast prototyping tool and that’s how i use it. I think it could be even faster if i could switch between horizontal/vertical transformations in fewer steps.
To answer the original question, I don’t fully understand why you want to apply the same scale value vertically and horizontally but separate times. Why don’t you just click the padlock icon and apply the same scale factor simultaneously? The point of the palette scaling is that you can scale back by clicking the button on the left (though you can do that in undo anyway), so what you want already exists. If you want to scale the selection by the same factor in both direction after trying it vertically, then reverse the scaling, close the padlock, and scale again; that seems to be fast enough.
In my case, if I just want to scale visually (when I don’t really care about the resulting size), I use bounding box.
