December 12, 1999

Copy and Paste Guides

This is actually a feature that could be extremely useful for multi-page documents. The ability to copy and paste Guides from one page to another or even Multiple-Master pages could be useful. But for now, I've come up with a quick solution (with some refinement from Judy Arndt) to at least copy a set of guides to another page very quickly.

Version: 5 and above

 
 


Above is a page that has a bunch of guides set. Now lets say I add more pages to the document later, or already have some pages in the document but want to copy these guides to those pages?

Normally this wouldn't be that difficult if you have just a couple of guide lines, but for a bunch of guides like above, or if you have many pages, it could take awhile to recreate the setup. Below is one way to copy and paste guides across many pages.

1) Double-click on any guide and it will bring up the Guide Editor shown above. While holding the Shift key click on the first guide in the list, then the last guide. Then hit the Release button. Then press OK.

 

2) This will turn your guides into regular Lines. While they are still selected, Group and Copy them into the clipboard. Then just Undo until you get the original guides back.

 

3) Now using the Page Selector at the bottom of the window, click to the next page. The page will automatically appear centered in the document window. Then Paste the group of lines.

Special Note

The lines may paste slightly off from the edges of the document.

To remedy that, use the Align palette to align the group to the center of the page like shown at Left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) While the group is still selected, click on the Guides layer. This will turn those lines into guides that should exactly mimic the first guides.

Then just repeat steps 3-4 for the remaining pages.

This is just one way to do this. You can also use a variation of the methods described in the tip called Document Layouts with Lens Fills in the Tips Archive. Using lens fills for a master page, and creating lines that mimic the look and color of guides, this method would work nicely for creating guides that would change across all of the pages instantly.