Is it possible to scale only the weight of strokes without the objects?

Question

I have a lot of line drawing illustrations each made with various weight strokes. Each illustration looks good by itself but when compared some look with overall thicker or thinner lines and I want to make them look the same because all will be used in the same book. To scale the weight of the strokes I make a scaled copy of each illustration and then select a line or set of lines selected using same -> stoke weight and with the eyedropper copy the style from the scaled version. This is a lot of work and I would like to know if there is a faster way to do this. Ideally I wish it was possible when using the scale tool to have the option to scale only the strokes with the same percentage.

Answer 1

...all I had to do was scale them with Scale Strokes & Effects turned off.
Not quite the same thing. Using just one step in the situation you described only works because you had the forethought to use the same stroke weights on the two differently-scaled drawings. If you had used different sets of stroke weights in the two drawings, and needed to scale them to similar size, simply turning off Scale Strokes would not suffice; thus the workaround described.
Example:
You draw a camshaft using stroke weights of 1 pt. and 2 pt.
From another original, you have a rocker arm also drawn using two stroke weights, but of .75 pt and 1.5 pt. The rocker arm is also drawn to a different scale, three times that of the camshaft.
You need to combine the camshaft and rocker arm in the same drawing.
Simply scaling the rocker arm to 33.3% with Scale Strokes turned off would not serve. The rocker arm would still have stroke weights lighter than those used in the camshaft. So you:
1. Note an overall dimension of the rocker arm drawing.
2. Scale the rocker arm to 133.33% with Scale Strokes on.
3. Scale the rocker arm back to its original size by keying the noted dimension back into the H or V dimension fields, with Scale Strokes off.
4. Scale the rocker arm to 33.33% with Scale Strokes off.
Even the workaround will not truly serve if the stroke weights used in the two drawings being merged are not proportional. For example, If the camshaft had been drawing using stroke weights of 1 pt and 2 pt, but the rocker arm had been drawn using .75 pt and 2 pt.
The underlying lesson is that it's advantageous to structure drawings using Graphic Styles, just as it's similarly advantageous to always use paragraph and character styles--even when you think you don't need them.
So GSI's desire for a sensible, no-nonsense setting that allows you to scale strokes without scaling paths is quite legitimate. This could be implemented as simply as:
Change this:
to this:
...and make the checkboxes behave like checkboxes are supposed to (non-exclusive), rather than like radio buttons (mutually exclusive).
Given several drawings (ex: a set of cartoon figures drawn at different times and/or from different sources) all drawn in loosey-goosey, artsy-tartsy eyeballed fashion with no structure whatsoever in terms of defined (and therefore selectable) styles, one could at least scale the various drawings to commensurate proportion and then just the stroke weights based on percentage of their original weights, and at least make the combined drawing more convincingly consistent. A "Sameness" slider could even be provided to skew the scaling of thin versus thick weights.
Failing that (as is no doubt certain), this feature could be built with Javascript. But the result of doing so would be far more elegant if one could get the Palette object of ScriptUI to work worth a dang.
JET