Scale switching

At last night's local model club meeting, we were discussing changing scales on decal sheets and no one was aware of any software for automatically switching the scale of copied/scanned sheets. It seems to me that someone should have developed such software by now, covering the typical scales (1/12, 1/18, 1/24, 1/25, 1/32, 1/42, 1/48, 1/72). Is anyone out there aware of such software?

Reply to
Larry Farrell
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Don't know about software, but whenever I scann a sheet for making my own decals, I always lay a flat, flexible plastic ruler alongside the decal sheet. This give me an "engineer's scale" so I can print the decals out at any scale with nothing more than a little simple math.

Reply to
The Old Man

as is converting between two known scales....

Reply to
OldSchool

Larry Farrell said the following on 17/04/2009 16:56:

What is the scanned image format in? If it's pdf then there might be an Adobe setting somewhere.

If it's a GIF or BMP then I might be able to help knock something up in VisualBASIC.

Reply to
Richard Brooks

We weren't talking about any specific application. Just a question of whether or not anything was available that could be utilized generally.

In response to another part of this thread, I know that it is relatively simple to calculate the correction when moving from one scale to another. However, I am interested in whether or not anything currently exists that automatically does the correction. That is, if one scans a

1/48 scale sheet, is there anything available that would automatically change it to a 1/72 sheet or a 1/32 sheet without having to do any calculations. Given the variety of scales used in modeling, it seems to me that someone would have set up a software program to do the conversion automatically.
Reply to
Larry Farrell

That's what VisualBASIC is! It's Microsoft's long-running programming language (along with the variants of C) for knocking up an easy job such as this.

To make it easy, call it a utility!

All these things have to be programmed to actually exist. There is no fairy dust to make them happen.

Tada! You finally got there in the last sentence. As stated before, that is what VisualBASIC is. It's a programming language whereby a programmer would take the original size, with all the calculations programmed in, in this case when selecting a button with the named scale on. If you don't want a software program which takes a source file and has buttons for selecting the various scales to print out then ignore this part of the thread.

Reply to
Richard Brooks

I do not believe there is a need for software. The math is too simple.

Merely divide one scale by the other- that is all there is to it.

Now, the only hard part is which scale is the dividend and which is the divisor. But simple reasoning will show you that pretty quick. Are you scaling UP, or scaling DOWN? That is, do you want to make the decals smaller or larger?

Just just set up the division so that the results will be less than or greater than 1. Anyone can do that by simple reasoning.

To make it easier, eliminate the fractional notation of the scale. Let's say going from 1:24 to 1:16. Now, we are scaling up, so we want the results to be larger than 1. Forget the fraction expression, just use the 24 and 16. If we divide 16 by 24, that is obviously less than

  1. However, 24 divided by 16 should be greater than 1 - that is what we want.

So, 24 divided by 16, in my head is the same as 3/2 (factor out the 8), or 1.5. So we need to scale up the decals by 1.5, or 150%.

Reply to
Don Stauffer

Thanks, Don. The math really isn't an issue, it just seems to me that someone would have developed a program that would automatically do all of the necessary conversions, no matter what scale change is involved.

It seems quite clear that such a program does not exist.

Reply to
Larry Farrell

I suspect nobody realizes that there might be a market for such, or if they do, then they don't believe iit's sufficiently large???

Reply to
OldSchool

Larry, go look on alt.binaries.models.scale might do what you want. Mike

Reply to
Mike G

If you can do it in the head then that's great but select a button and 'go' in these days seems to be the way to go.

[Tonnage snipped.]

I bet that the prevalance in model scaling software only just surpasses text input to Morse conversion programmes.

Face it people, we're a niche market!

Reply to
Richard Brooks

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