A recent post on CreativeTechs reminded me that we hadn’t talked about guides in InDesign for a while. In it, Craig points out how useful it is to hold down the Shift key when you drag out a guide from one of the document rulers. The Shift key tells InDesign to snap the guide to the nearest ruler tick mark. I love that little trick. And did you know that you can double-click on a ruler to add a guide at that point? Even better, you can Shift-double-click on the ruler to add a guide at the tick mark nearest the point you clicked. It’s so easy!
And don’t forget the cool “measure with a ruler” tip Anne-Marie came up with, and my post on how to select or delete all your guides at once.
While we’re at it, here are a few other guide tricks you need to have under your belt:
- If you let go of a guide on the page, it’s a page guide; if you let go on the pasteboard, it’s a pasteboard (or spread) guide. But if you’re over the page and hold down the Command/Ctrl key, you’ll always get a pasteboard guide.
- Never forget that guides are just objects in InDesign, so you can select them, adjust their position with the arrow keys on the keyboard or the measurement in the Control panel, put them on layers, lock them, use Step and Repeat with them, and so on.
- If you spend time setting up your guides on a page just right, re-use that work! You can copy and paste selected guides to a new page and they remember their geometry (where they were on the page). You can also export selected guides as a snippet (using File > Export). When you import that snippet into a new document, the guides all come in at the same location (if the document page sizes are the same).
There are many other fun guide tricks out there, including this one about coloring guides by Pariah. Anyone else have some fun guide tips to share?
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on March 7, 2008
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