Resizing Part of an Object

[drlarrye]

Is there a way to resize part of an object without affecting the rest of it.  In the attached file I would like to shorten the length of the object between the guides, but need to leave the ends unaffected so they will fit with their counterparts.  (It's a frame for a tile game and the tiles were made a little too small so I would like to adjust the frame rather than remake all of the tiles.)

[brynn]

Well you can't do anything with that particular object, since it's an imported raster image.  But after it's traced (either manually, or auto-traced), there should be a way to do what you want.  There are probably a couple of ways to approach it.

Since it needs to connect with other existing objects, I would say that precision will be important.  I think I would use a path operation (boolean), to break the object at the guides.

Hhmm....what about the tear drop shaped "holes"?  Will those need to remain the same size as they are now?  If they need to keep the same size, it could become very tricky to do what you want.  Not impossible, but tricky.

I'm not going to give detailed steps about how to do this, until I know about those areas.  But once I understand that, I can tell you how I would do it.

[drlarrye]

I gotta tell you that you guys are the best for answering questions.  You don't need to answer this one now because I found another way and I can't see needing this again.  I put the pieces together, grouped then, scaled them to the interior diameter I needed, and ungrouped them.  It did reduce the ends but it also reduced the piece it fit with.  (That's probably what you would've said to do if I had told you what I needed rather than what I thought I needed.)

Thanks till the next weird question.

[brynn]

Nice, I'm glad you found a solution.  I like to see new users jumping in with both feet.  Even if you get it wrong, you still learn something!

Ummm....I definitely would not have suggested scaling a raster image.  If you scaled the imported raster image (or images), there's a chance it (they) became a little blurry.  It sounds like you only scaled it down by a small amount, and often, the pixelation is not noticable in that situation (while scaling up is much more noticable, or scaling either way by a large amount).

Anyway, if you have a vector version of these pieces somewhere, it would be better to scale those, and export new raster versions, for whatever you're using them for.  Have you learned about the difference between raster and vector yet?