Your original posting made no mention of ticks. I could not produce a problem
such as described by your second posting. To discuss this problem with a
Technical Support engineer, send us an email using the online form at:
http://www.microcal.com/www/tech/tsform.html

Dear Mr. D'Unger:

Thanks for the help. It helped for what I wanted to do. However, I still
have the problem that if I make such changes, save the file, quit Origin,
and then later return to the same file, the size of ticks revert back to
the default settings. Would you be kind enough to tell me where I can
change this "feature". I could not find references to it under
`preferences'.

In the LAYER PROPERTIES of every layer (select a layer by clicking the layer
icon, then select Format:Layer from the menu), there is a Scale Elements
section with two options:

Scale With Layer Frame Objects scale proportionally with the Layer
and Fixed Factor Objects display at a fixed proportion of their size
(The actual factor is in the adjacent text box)

By default, Origin plot Templates have 'Scale With Layer Frame' enabled which
will allow you to resize a layer and have objects in that layer resize proportionately.

Incidently, when you resize a layer (or when you Arrange All Layers), Origin
adjusts the proportional factor text to reflect the degree to which a layer
has changed size. Obviously a one dimensional number can not keep perfect
track of two dimensional changes, but the number can be useful.

If you plan to make size adjustments to separate layers on a page and still
wish to have all your text (for example) keep their size, you should pick a
font size, enable the Fixed Factor option and enter an appropriate factor.
The appropriate factor will probably be close to what Origin has set it to,
but you are free to use whatever works for you.

Font Size Factor Equivalent Font Size
11 1 11
11 .5 5.5
22 1 22
22 .5 11

Here is a script that allows you to enable Fixed Factor and set the factor for
all the layers of a Graph window:

doc -e LW {
layer$(page.active).fixed=1;
layer$(page.active).factor=.4;
};