Help with scaling

[Jason Burnett]

I have a bunch of kitchen cabinets that I laid out using Illustrator

I used the estimate that 10 pixels = 1 inch

So I could set my 30 inch wide cabinets as 300px and it would work. This also made decimals easier because a 3/4 " board would be 7.5 pixels, for example.

I assumed this was a 10:1 or 1:10 scale but I have a feeling Illustrator isn't translating pixels to inches, they are translating inches output to some other scale. I don't think they are considering pixels at all. 

What they really should do, and it would be super easy, is to have you select an element that you know the actual width or height of in real life, then tell the scale tool. It would do the simple conversion for you and could even start allowing you to use "scaled" values instead of whatever units you were using. So I could grab a cabinet shape that I know is 30" and tell the dimensions tool: This is 30" and it would find the scale. Add a button to allow me to enter scaled values in illustrator fields and suddenly it's super useful. I could tick that button and create a rectangle 60" scaled and it would be the perfect size no matter how big my original art was. 

Do I have to then resize everything to match one of the accepted scale values? How would I even go about doing that? Multiply my current pixel sizes by 72?

I would like to e able to use the new Dimensions tool to write out the dimensions of my plans, but I am not sure the best way to do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Monika Gause]

Why use pixels at all?

You can work in scale in inches or even use a Large Canvas document and work in real size.

The new dimension tool can have a scale set up, so it would put the measurements as you like them.