Editing Scale Tool - Keyboard Shortcut - Factor Numbers Question

[GregoryElwood1]

When using the Scale Tool in editing polygon Feature Classes, one can hit the "F" key and a popup menu is displayed titled "Scale Factor".

Is there a tip or trick to using the Scale Factor numbers? For instance, are these numbers an absolute value? If I change, say, 7.602 to 7.5 will the polygon be reduced in size by a value of 0.102?

Or are these numbers relative in some fashion? If one has a value of 7.602 and enters a Scale Factor of 0.5 will the polygon be reduced by half its size?

I've tried playing with this keyboard shortcut for a bit and am not sure I'm using it the right way. Any information on the correct use of this shortcut would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Gregory

[JimCousins]

Interesting, I had not used that before. Found this post:

[TABLE="class: forum"]Subject[TD="class: postvalue"]Re: How to scale features by setting an absolute scale factor. [/TD]
Author[TD="class: postvalue"]Ray Carnes [/TD]
Date[TD="class: postvalue"]Dec 28, 2005 [/TD]
Message[TD="class: postvalue"]See how you go with this:

Divide the final area by the original area and take the square root of the result and use it as your scaling factor.

ie: You want the final polygon to have an area of 50,250 square units and it currently has an area of 10,000 square units.

50250 / 10000 = 5.025 and the square root of 5.025 is 2.2415612.

Use 2.2415612 as your scaling factor.

Ray Carnes,
ESRI Technical Marketing. [/TD]
 
[/TABLE]

[GregoryElwood1]

Wow!

That's...uh...interesting. Square root of derived polygon area.

That seems to me more appropriate for a Geoprocessing tool or something rather than a simple geometry editing tool. But what do I know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Temc4-G0Fu4

Onward!

Gregory