Resize scale bar in ArcGIS Pro

[deleted-user-sYHsW3p_gN5o]

Currently in ArcGIS Pro the scale bar doesn't totally resize when you try to resize it. It goes from this:

To this:

Notice how the length of the scale bar increased, but the height did not. This seems counter-intuitive and should be improved in an update to ArcGIS Pro.

[KoryKramer]

To clarify the equivalency issue:

In ArcMap we see:

Resized to this:

[deleted-user-sYHsW3p_gN5o]

Exactly Kory. Thanks for adding this!

[ThomasColson]

Kory Kramer‌, during your all-night marking as implemented marathon, you may have missed this one....to others, this is implemented, albeit not in an arc map equivalency way: you will need to go into item properties and set the height, there is a reason why you can't do it with the mouse-drag method that a developer explained to me that I don't understand, but it makes sense....

[KoryKramer]

Thanks, Tom.  You're right that the height can now be controlled in ArcGIS Pro 2.2, which does provide a way to fully control the size of the bar.  Like you note, the mouse-drag method does not work, and yes, there is some design behind why it was decided to not have everything including text scale when you decide to change the size of the bar.

But because there is some work happening around that mouse-drag functionality that may be pertinent to the scale bar among other elements, such as legend, I wanted to hold off.

Cheers

[davedoesgis]

Semi-related question: As you resize the scale bar, the numbers of map units are not always nice round numbers. Is there some way to explicitly set the length of the scale bar in map units? For example, in Kory Kramer‌'s screenshot above, he resized to 2,480 miles. If I were doing that, I would want to round it down to 2,400 to make a number neatly divisible by 4. Is there some way to just tell ArcGIS Pro to make it 2,400 miles long? Fooling around with the scale bar item's width in page inches is really tedious!

[deleted-user-sYHsW3p_gN5o]

I totally agree. I often spend time just guessing-and-checking to try to get the scale bars to even numbers. Perhaps this should be its own Idea page?

[davedoesgis]

It's been there for over 2 years. Each vote is 10 points and, with mine, it now has 30 points...

https://community.esri.com/ideas/12503-set-scale-bar-distance

[BRENNEJM]

Can someone else double check me on this? I just installed ArcGIS Pro 2.4 and am finding the same results as the original poster. I can still go into the properties and control the height, but all it does is increase the elements bounding box size, it doesn't increase (or decrease) the size of the scale bar. It will even let you shrink it so that the scale bar is outside the bounding box. Maybe I'm missing something?

EDIT: It would also be nice if I could choose "Adjust Width" as the Resize Behavior and still go to the Properties and change the height of the scale bar. I do this every single day in ArcMap.

[Anonymous User]

I had this same problem... But finally realized it was because I had multiple map frames of varying scales open in the same layout. You need to make sure that you select the map frame with which you want the scale to bar to apply. If you have an empty map frame selected in your layout, then the scale bar will not resize in any way and remain at the same divisions

[BRENNEJM]

Thanks for the reply. I just tried it again with only one map frame and made sure it was selected in the scale bar properties, but I'm still getting the same results. Dragging a corner changes the width of the scale bar, but not the height. Typing a new height in only adjusts the element bounding box, not the scale bar itself. Are you running Pro 2.4? I'm tempted to install Pro 2.2 and see if it works as expected in that version like the above comments state.