Distribute pallete usage question

[nedstar1]

Het friends,

I'm using Ill 10 in a windows enxironment. I'm working on a design that requires a smbol to be placed in a repeating pattern across a rectangle. I've gotten it looking pretty good, but I wanted to see if there was some way I could achieve the same result faster. Here's what I did:

I copied the symbol repeatedly and used the aligna nd distribute commands to line them up and space them out. Then I grouped them, copied that group, pasted, and added a horizontal offset so that the rows are alternating, and copied these rows down, aligned and spaced the row groups, and then made a group of all of them. I dragged the whole group over the rectangle, and used a clipping mask to hide what should not be visible. It worked fine - it looks like I wanted it to.

However, I subsequently had to go back and add more white space between the symbols, and this is where I lost my way,

It seems to me that I should be able to scale the alignment and distribution of objects proportionally without altering the dimensions of the objects themselves. As in, I want to be able to drag the bounding box and have them all spaced further apart, but remain the same size and dimensions.

Anyone know a good way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[fizzak]

First there is an easier way to distribute... Copy the object in the direction and spacing that you want then repeatedly hit crtl-D on PC or cmd-d on Mac if my Mac memory serves me right. I cannot think of any efficient way to scale-distribution the objects in Illustrator. You could use a Blend to path (replace spine) and then Direct-Select, drag a point on the spine to stretch the distribution but only in one direction and one row. Or you could use Distribute-Spacing and set the point distance but that tool gets really funky... Or use MM Freehand.
This is something I've been waiting for Adobe to put into Illustrator since version 7. Unless someone else knows how.