Rescaling drawings

[larry@luckham.com]

I've been using Visio 2010 to diagram fire and arson scenes, and find it very handy for that purpose. In most cases the drawing is printed on 11 X 17 paper to be included in the final report. I want the drawing itself to be in a scale that will fill that size page. The default size for architectural plan drawings is 1/4"=1' and in some cases that might work reasonable well. In others it does not. Logic would suggest that going to Print Preview and changing the drawing scale should produce the desited effect, and that the changes should be preportional. In other words, a drawing done at 1/4"=1' if reduced to 1/8"=1' should take up exactly half as much space on a printed page. But, that does not seem to be what happens. When I change the drawing scale in this way the result does not seem to be directly proportional to the scale change. It often jumps to a very large, in fact too large, size on the page. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if I'm missing a point.

A while back I discovered a work around and that is to create a custom page size in Print Preview that produces the desire result. While this has worked, I'm sure it's not the clean way to accomplish this. How should it work?