Hi guys (and girls),

I'm using Inkscape to draw some amatour stuff, including blueprints of furniture ect.

My biggest problem is working with the scale. I'm drawing on A4 format, while things I draw are always bigger. Sometimes a lot bigger. To deal with this I use calculator - it is good as long as no dynamic changes need to be implemented. When this happens chaos takes over my whole work.

Is there any way to easily implement general scale for current drawing? No matter in percent (like f.e. 70%) or in standard ratio (lets say 1:40). So that, keeping A4 size of the document I could place all sizes of elements in real figures. And after changing sizes manually (by pulling) in the drawing I would see real size? Hope I'm putting this clear enough...

I would set the default units in the document properties to your real-world units (inches, cm, etc.), view the drawing as outlines and use no fill or stroke.

I'm not clear what you're asking. Are you asking if there's a way to make your drawing, and then switch the view to different scales? Or say automatically scale the whole drawing?

Real word units, and draw in 1:10 or 1:100 scales I suggest.
That would make calculations sort of unnecessary. Like, you have a 60 cm (=600 mm) wide chair, that you draw in 1:10 ---> the drawing will be 60 mm wide. Same numeric input, but different prefix for the unit. It shouldn't be much of a problem.

But, in case you are looking for typing in the real units, use shapes in your design -rectangle for example.
Draw the rectangle, group it (Ctrl+G), scale the group down to any desired size.
Then, you can enter the group, select the rectangle and with the rectangle toolbox you can type in the original values.


Oh yes as already mentioned, use no strokes /change to geometric bounding box in the prefs.