ASK MORDY: The Changing of the Guides

Chris Rogers sends in this question about guides:

Is there a way to create a guide at a specific point? Eg, a vertical guide at 167 pixels? Or a horizontal guide at 83 pixels? I’m thinking more like a non-traditional number/not on a number point that can be snapped to on a grid by dragging it out. Seems like I remember a way to click somewhere and enter a number and program creates it for you? Photoshop?

This is a great question, only because it provides a wonderful opportunity for me to also explain a change that was made in Illustrator CS3.

First, let's talk about Illustrator CS2 (and just about any version prior to that). Guides are really objects. When you drag out a guide, you can simply use the X and Y coordinate fields in either the Transform palette or the Control palette (at the top of the screen) to reposition those guides numerically. But there's a catch. By default, guides are locked. Meaning that when you initially drag out a guide, as soon as you release it, it becomes locked. And locked objects can't be selected. So what you must do is first unlock your guides (it's easily available by just right-clicking on the artboard). Then you can select a guide and reposition it numerically.

I should mention that InDesign's guides can also be repositioned this way, but the guides are unlocked by default -- making it easy to quickly drag out a guide, punch in a value, and move on.

I should point out that in both InDesign and in Illustrator as well -- since guides are objects, you can also copy and paste guides (or use the Align functions on them). Of course, all while they are unlocked.

WHAT CHANGED IN CS3?

In Illustrator CS3, guides are UNLOCKED by default. That means you can drag out a guide and immediately punch in a coordinate in the Control panel. Which is pretty cool.

HOWEVER, InDesign has the leg up in this case because of something important. You see, in InDesign, while guides are objects, they are "special" kinds of objects. And in InDesign, when you make selections, you can either select guides, or objects -- but not both. In fact, in InDesign, if you marquee select an area that contains both objects and guides, only the objects become selected. In this way, InDesign intelligently allows you to have unlocked guides that don't get in the way, yet can easily be repositioned at any time.

Illustrator CS3 suffers from a problem because guides aren't special objects -- they are objects. And so, if guides are unlocked, they become selected just as art does. The result is that while Illustrator CS3 makes it really easy to reposition guides, it's also really easy to constantly move and delete guides along with your artwork. In fact, you may find that one of the first things you do when using Illustrator CS3 is lock the guides so you don't keep accidentally selecting them.

If the Illustrator team wants to keep guides unlocked moving forward, I would recommend they adopt InDesign's logic for selecting guides as well. Otherwise, the guides just keep getting in the way.

An alternative solution is to create a new layer in your document -- and only add guides to that layer. In that way, it might be easier to just lock and unlock the entire layer (FreeHand anyone?).

Or here's another possible solution. Create your guides, and then group them. If you want to move individual guides without other objects getting in the way, double click on one of the guides to enter group isolation mode. Then only your guides are active in your document, and you can move them easily. Simply double click to exit the guide group and you're back to working.

Still, I like InDesign's implementation in this regard.

ASK MORDY: In Pursuit of Snappyness

This question comes from Jacob Brunny:

Alot of times I create guides and will drag over boxes or whatever to fit to them and it looks good from like 100% or something like that, then when I zoom in closer I see that they are actually not right up to the guide but off by a small amount, it seems Illustrator never gets them perfect except if you are zoomed in alot?

SIGH. In reality, this has been a personal frustration of mine for many many many years. I touched on this issue here but the upshot is that Illustrator doesn't snap object geometry. Rather, Illustrator snaps cursor position.

Go ahead and try it. Draw a guide. Then draw a rectangle and fill it with a color. The click anywhere in the fill area of the rectangle (not on the path), and drag it towards the guide. The edge of the rectangle will not snap to the guide. Keep dragging until your cursor touches the guide -- and you'll see that the cursor itself does snap to the guide.

So where you click on an object makes a difference on how that object snaps. If you click on an anchor, it appears that anchor snaps to another anchor when you drag it, but remember that it's the cursor position, not the anchor. Since when you zoom in really close, it's easier to mouse down on the anchor or the area you're looking to snap, it appears as though Illustrator is more accurate when you're zoomed in that close.

In InDesign, object boundaries DO snap to guides. You can grab a picture frame anywhere and drag it -- and you'll see the boundary of the frame snap to guides.

Because a typical Illustrator document contains many more objects than an InDesign one does, one might think that having objects snap in Illustrator might not be wanted. But at the same time, I'm not happy with the current implementation either. So instead, we struggle with this every day.