Usually when you scale something, you want to apply the same scale factor to all your objects in all directions. For instance, two rectangles that were 4x6 and 5x7 might become 8x12 and 10x14 after scaling.But what if you wanted the rectangles to become 4x12 and 5x14 -- so they were scaled in only one direction? Okay, you could use the stretch command, but you'd have to do it twice, since the change in the rectangles isn't the same.Instead, you can make a temporary block consisting of the objects you want to scale, and change its properties so that it has non-uniform scales in the X and Y directions. Then, when you explode the block, you get your original objects back, but scaled in one direction only (or by different factors for each direction).As usual, there are a couple things to keep in mind. You have to watch out for polylines with arc segments. Non-uniformly scaled arcs become elliptical arcs, and polylines don't support those. So when you explode your temporary block, any polylines with arcs will be exploded into their component lines and (elliptical) arcs.Also, for the last few releases, you have been able to specify that blocks can only be scaled uniformly -- obviously you need to turn that off to use this tip. You can either do that when you create the block, or from the Properties palette inside the Block Editor with no objects selected.

Go to the original post...