I’m trying to get a handle on resizing madness in Flash, discussed in previous posts. Here’s what I’ve learned.

First, one must think of Symbols in a particular way. Before my mentality went like this: create a shape object, Modify -> Convert to Symbol, now the shape is a symbol. This is, I believe now, an error in the mental model. Think instead of the Symbol as a container. It can hold a shape, or another Symbol, or some number of those combined in different ways. A better way to construct symbols would be to use Insert -> New Symbol to create a blank symbol and then draw inside of it. I think the result will be the same, but this way enforces the mental model.

Next, I was confused and angry about object dimensions and scaling when resizing. Let’s say you draw a rectangle and you aim for 100 pixels by 100 pixels. But since you’re human you miss and make it, oh, let’s say 112x112px. Easy solution, right: select the object, enter the correct size in the width and height text boxes. But if you then look at the transform panel you’ll see that the actual width and height haven’t changed so much as a scale transform has been applied. So now the shape is 112×112 scaled by 89%. Maybe this wouldn’t make you angry, but it sure tied my shoelaces right up. A needless level of complexity added needlessly, which of course is SOP for adobe. But I was being tricked yet again, as explained in a post which is not useful to me really except for the following passage:

Flash resizes merge-shapes on an absolute scale as long as the shape remains selected. Deselect the shape, and the current width and height become the shape’s new 100%.

Which means that all one would need to do is deselect the object and it fixes its numbers up. But wait!

Flash always resizes drawing-objects, primitives, text fields, groups, and symbols on an absolute scale (applying the percentage you enter into the panel to the element’s original size).

Merge-shapes are shapes drawn with object drawing mode disabled, and drawing-objects are shapes drawn with object drawing mode enabled. Modal operation is always a good thing, right? So object shapes resize differently than merge shapes. Can you see why I might have been confused?

Now, this is abysmal, but livable for the following reasons:

1. Functionally they are equivalent. I hate this reasoning, so let’s move on to

2. The types of things we will be turning into symbols are typically not just simple shapes. It doesn’t make sense to me to scale a rectangle, which can be described entirely with just two numbers in the first place. But for a more complex drawing it makes more sense (although technically still not forgivable in my mind yet). And,

3. The scale of the objects inside a Symbol is different from the scale of the symbol itself. If there’s a 112px square scaled down 89% to 100px inside a Symbol, that Symbol is 100px at 100%. If you change the size of the stuff within the symbol, the Symbol should take on that size. You should only have to worry about Symbol scale once one is placed on the Stage.