July 22 , 2000

Manually Duplicating Guides

I can't believe I've overlooked this function for so long... and it's so easy. Not to mention that it's totally undocumented in the manual or the online help system (in fact, try to find anything on Guides in the online help system). Want to save yourself some time when laying out some guides? This one is for you!

Version: 5 and above

 
 


Above is the bottom right corner of a document. That blue curved line is a custom guide I've created.

I want to add some horizontal and vertical guides to act as margins, and duplicate that custom guide.

 

Now potentially, I could simply use this Guide Editor dialog shown above to add my guides. This can be pretty precise, but what I'm about to show you will take half the time.

By the way, to show the Guide Editor, just double-click on a guide.

 

Now watch the animation above. You see how fantastic and easy it is to manually duplicate guides?

To get this to work, first turn on the Option (Alt) -drag copies path option found in the Preferences -> Object category.

Then with the pointer tool, hold the Option (Alt) key and click-drag a guide from another guide. It even works with custom guides.

This isn't quite like the discovery of the atom, but did you know that this functionality has been around since FreeHand v5? I just recently fell into this one during a heavy guide placing session. I just thought to myself, "what if I tried this...." and to my surprise it worked!

I don't know about you, but this will definitely save time from having to go all the way to those rulers for a guide every time.