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Smart Guides are a great tool to help you align, resize, and rotate objects without measuring. You can also adjust them to your liking and make them even “smarter” with these tips:
1. You can toggle all Smart Guides on or off by pressing Cmd+U/Ctrl+U.
2. Most of the aspects of Smart Guides (including the color of the guides) can be customized in Guides & Pasteboard preferences.
3. Smart Cursors show you an object’s current size or rotation angle as you move or transform it. If you find this distracting, you can turn off Smart Cursors in Interface preferences, by deselecting Show Transformation Values.
4. Smart Guides only display guides related to objects currently in view. So if your Smart Guides seem “dumb”, zoom in on the area containing objects you want to align to. You should get better results.
5. To make Smart Guides stop snapping to column guides, turn off Snap To Guides (View > Grids & Guides > Snap To Guides).
6. You can temporarily turn off all Smart Guides (along with Snap to Guides and Snap to Document Grid) on the Mac by holding the Ctrl key after you start dragging an object.
This article was last modified on July 7, 2021
This article was first published on January 27, 2019
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Is there a way to get snapping to objects within a group? I would like to snap an object outside a group to objects within a group. I can only get it to work when I ungroup the those objects.
6.5 And vice versa (temporarily turn them on when they’re not active).