How do I scale a whole figure in pic?

Question

Given a pic figure:

.PS
circle "Foo"
arrow
box "Bar"
arrow
box dashed "Foo" "Dashed"
.PE

Is it possible to scale the whole diagram element's widths and heights?

I have tried scale = 2 without success.

Answer 1

Scaling a pic-picture does not really work. The scale variable seems mainly used when drawables are specified with a size.

You could try setting a maximum height, like in

.PS 1.5
<your picture>

but that will result in large texts in the boxes.

Reducing the font size too gives a more acceptable picture:

.ps -5
.PS 1.5
circle "Foo"
arrow
box "Bar"
arrow
box dashed "Foo" "Dashed"
.PE
.ps +5

In the end, I resorted to drawing the pic-drawings separately and embedding them as eps. This has the advantage that you can not only scale them, but also use them in-line.

Answer 2

You can set the width and height of the whole picture by providing them as arguments to the .PS macro, in inches. Try

.PS 6

scale only affect items that have been given an explicit size, for example circle radius 1, and also works as a divisor, not a multiplier. Eg scale=2.54 is suggested as a way to have numbers interpreted in centimetres, so radius 1 is of 1cm instead of 1inch, i.e. a lot smaller.