The Scale command

This command lets you scale a drawing up or down or, in other words, you can use the Scale command to make a drawing larger or smaller. You can select the Scale command from the Modify panel, as in the following screenshot, or you can also use its command alias, SC:

For the Scale command, I will use this window symbol, where the length of the AB line is 10 units:

In the following example, we will learn how to change the scale of the window symbol shown in the preceding figure using different scale factors:

1. Start the Scale command, then select the complete drawing that you want to scale, and press the Enter key.
2. AutoCAD will now prompt you to select the base point. While scaling an object, the base point remains fixed, so in this case, let's click on the A point of the window symbol for the base point.
3. Now, you need to specify the scale factor that will ultimately decide the final size of the selected drawing. A scale factor between 0 and 1 will decrease the size of the object and a scale factor greater than 1 will increase the size of the object. As an example, a scale factor of 0.5 will make the drawing half the size and a scale factor of 2 will make the drawing twice the size. Similarly, for decreasing the size by one fourth, you need to use a scale factor of 0.25 and for making it four times larger, the scale factor will be 4.
4. In this case, let's type 2 for the scale factor and then press Enter.

A new window symbol twice the size of the original one will be made, and the A point will remain where it was before the Scale command as it was selected as the base point.

In this case, the original object was scaled up in size but if you want to keep the original object in the drawing and want to scale a copy of it, then you can use the Copy subcommand of the Scale command, which is explained in the next section.