When you drag a ruler guide onto the page, the guide extends from page edge to page edge (if you drag with your cursor in the page area) or from pasteboard edge to pasteboard edge (if you drag with your cursor on the pasteboard).
But what if you want a guide that is shorter than your page, or slightly longer? Here is a hack technique that you can use to achieve this. In the tutorial below, I’ll describe this technique with specific dimensions. But once you’ve seen how this works, you can obviously use your own dimensions for your own purposes.
1. Create a new document, with a page size of 5 inches x 5 inches.
2. Turn to the master page, and add a couple of guides to the master page.
3. Turn to page 1.
4. Select the Page Tool in the Tools panel, and click on page 1.
5. In the Control panel, change the width and height of the page to 8.5 inches x 11 inches.
6. If desired, use the Page Tool to reposition the master page “overlay” outline on the new, larger document page if desired.
7. Click on the page with the Selection tool, and you’ll see that the guides are now shorter than the page.
You can also make the document page smaller than the master page, in which case the guides will hang off the page partially into the pasteboard.
What is this good for? I don’t know, exactly. If nothing else, someday you might open an InDesign file created by someone else and discover guides that are shorter than the page. It could also be useful for creating custom guides in a template. You could also use it to create an alternate set of “margins” to indicate a “safe zone” for object placement as shown in the example below.
This article was last modified on December 21, 2021
This article was first published on January 5, 2012
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
