Transform every item in group without affecting the group

Question

In my Illustrator diagram I have a group with ~100 small objects in it (dots on a scatterplot chart). I want to scale each dot in place to be smaller.

If I select the group and scale, the placement of the objects changes. I don't want this:

If I use the Transform Each dialog, I (somewhat surprisingly) still get the same result. If I edit the group (double-click) and select all the items and use Transform Each, I still get the same result.

The only way I've found to avoid this problem is to select all the items (which automatically causes the owning group to be selected), deselect one item (which causes the group to be deselected), and use Transform Each.

And then select the one leftover item and Transform Again.

Is there a better way than this hack, to scale all items in a group without the group also scaling?

Answer 1

The only way that I know to do this is:

1. Select the group of objects.
2. Hit UNGROUP (command-shift-g) - the objects will stay selected.
3. Perform whatever TRANSFORM EACH operations that you need - the objects will still stay selected.
4. Hit GROUP (command-g) to regroup them before deselecting.

Only slightly less 'hacky' that what you're already doing, but I think that the behaviour whereby a group is treated as an 'each' is deliberate. I've certainly found it useful a few times.