Drawing Rulers

Same here, I'd do it with the blend tool.

How would the blend tool work for lines of different length like this?

Lets say you're doing a 12 inch ruler.

That means 13 long lines for the inches, 25 medium lines for the half inches and 121 short lines for the tenths (ie, always one more than dividing 12 inches by the respective space).

It doesn't matter that your half inch divisions also overlay the one inch divisions, if they are the same thickness and colour, because you will not be able to distinguish the shorter ones. In fact, it doesn't matter if they are different colours or thickesses either, though in that case you will have to be sure that the shorter divisions are arranged behind the larger divisions.

Note however that when you use a blend with 4 steps it does not count the two end divisions, so you need to set the blend steps to 2 less than each of the above numbers.

So that's done with 3 blends of line sets.
I thought it could be done in one blend

Thanks!

There are several other ways to make the ticks, but here is one of the quicker ways:

1. draw a short tick

2. open the step and repear docker and enter a number of copies and horizontal offset distance

3.  click apply.

4.  Either

(a) Repeat the procedure for the long ticks, obviously the number of copies will be less

OR

     (b) as we have made all of the ticks short, Ctrl+Select each fifth tick and then drag these all at once to turn them into long ticks.

Done! 

Using Ctrl+D to duplicate ticks instead of the Docker was also another quick way, but not as quick as the docker. You can even make a group of one long and 4 short ticks and then Ctrl+D many times to repeat the group to make as many ticks as needed; just make sure you move the first duplicate the correct distance to begin with.