This InDesign tip on Making Liquid Guides Solid was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on May 17, 2018.
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If you drag a guide out from the rulers while you have the Page tool, you create a special kind of guide called a liquid guide.
Liquid guides are used with the Liquid Layout features to define which objects should scale when you change the size of a page. (For the full story on using Liquid Layout, see issue #47 of InDesign Magazine.)
You can tell a liquid guide from a regular page guide by the fact that it’s dashed and the presence of a doohickey (aka “adornment”) that you can click to convert it to a regular ruler guide.
The doohickey remains on the converted guide.
And if you click it again either on purpose or by accident, it goes back to being a liquid guide.
However, you can make a converted guide forget that it was ever a liquid guide. After converting it to a regular ruler guide, take the Page tool and in the Control panel, change the Liquid Page Rule to Off.
The doohickey disappears, and the guide is the same as if it had never been a liquid guide.
Bonus tip: If you want to convert a number of guides at once, select them with the Selection tool, then right-click and choose Guide Type.
This article was last modified on July 7, 2021
This article was first published on May 22, 2018
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