Contributed by Neeraj Nandkeolyar, Illustrator Workflow Team
Haven’t we all tried to create ruler guides as accurately as possible, but found after zooming in we found the guides were off? This is one of the reasons why most of us drag ruler guides out at maximum zoom. Here are some quick ways to get accurate ruler guides, without having to work zoomed in.
Choose the desired ruler units, either from Preferences, or control-click (on Mac) or right-click (on Win) on the rulers.
First, the basics: to create simple vertical or horizontal ruler guides, drag from one of the rulers into your image. A guide appears where your release your mouse.
Now, while dragging the new guide, press the Shift key. This makes the guide snap to visible, accurate sub-divisions on the ruler.
This snapping works only for new guides and not for existing ones. So how can you accurately re-position a guide later? First, select the guide, and from the Transform panel or Control panel, change its location on the x-axis (for vertical guides) or y-axis (for horizontal guides).
And finally, how can you create vertical guides from horizontal rulers? No problem, just just press Opt/Alt while dragging the guide from the ruler. And accurate snapping with Shift works here as well.
Nice tip! Never thought to use the Shift key, nor Illustrator's Transform panel.
Thanks Neeraj! Great tips about working with guides. But I'd really like to see Illustrator adopt some of the functionality from InDesign in this area. Sure, you can easily reposition guides via coordinates in the Transform (or Control) panel, but you'd have to first unlock your guides. And if you have your guides unlocked, you'll easily select them by accident when you select your artwork.
In InDesign, there is logic that allows guides to be unlocked, but when you make a selection that also encompasses art, the art becomes selected and the guides are "temporarily" unselectable. While this would prevent a user from selecting and moving objects and guides together, I think it's rare that designers would want that. I'd rather see a state where I could guides remain unlocked so that I can easily adjust them, but where the guides never get in the way of the objects.
Good to know about the Shift key feature.