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A Few Guidelines to Follow

© 2002 by Foster D. Coburn III. All Rights Reserved.

Quite often when you are working within CorelDRAW, there are boundaries you have to follow. Or maybe you are just trying to align a number of items. While there are various ways you can accomplish these tasks, one of the better ways is to use guidelines. This article will show you the basics of using guidelines and then we'll go through advanced topics such as using different sets of guidelines on each page. Most of this discussion will be relevant to both CorelDRAW 9 and 10 and I will note things that only work in CorelDRAW 10. Users of older versions will note that things aren't quite as described.

The Basics

A guideline is a special type of object. By default it doesn't print, but it can be printed if you so desire. When it is displayed, it will show as a dashed line. But the most important characteristic is that guidelines are magnetic. As you draw objects near a guideline, they will snap to the guideline. If you move objects, they will also snap to the guideline as they get close. And sometimes you simply use them as a visual reference.

To create a guideline, click on the ruler at either the left or top of your screen and drag the guideline onto your drawing page. Wherever you release the mouse is where the guideline will be placed. Initially the guideline will be Red. This indicates that it is selected. As it is just like other objects, you can do lots of things with it. First, you can press the Delete key and delete it. Users of older versions will note that you can no longer drag guidelines off of the drawing page. Clicking and dragging on the guideline will allow you to move it wherever you want. And if you click on it a second time, you'll get rotation handles so that you can rotate the guideline. You can deselect a guideline by either clicking on the drawing page or pressing the Esc key on your keyboard. When you do this, the color of the guideline will change to Blue (in Draw 9) or Gray (in Draw 10) by default.

Guidelines that are drug from the top ruler will be in the horizontal orientation and those drug from the left ruler will be vertically oriented. There is one other orientation and that is a diagonal guideline. We'll discuss it more a bit later. At right you see several guidelines on the drawing page. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal guidelines are shown on the drawing page. Note that one of the guidelines is Red, indicating that it is still selected.

For those situations where you have to place guidelines at an exact position on the page, this is quite easy to do using the Property Bar. When a guideline is selected, it's position in shown in the x, y values at the left end of the Property Bar as shown below left. Vertical guidelines will have the y value dimmed and horizontal guidelines will have the x value dimmed. So select the value that is available and change it to the exact position where you would like the guideline to move. After changing the number, press the Enter key and the guideline will jump to the new location.

Rotating guidelines can also be done on the Property Bar as shown at left. Just next to the position values is the amount of rotation. By default, horizontal guidelines have 0 rotation and vertical guidelines have 90 degrees of rotation. Highlight the amount of rotation and type in any value you want. Once you've changed the value, press the Enter key and the guideline will be rotated to the new value.

One last change you can make is to the guideline's color. Remember, guidelines are just a special type of object. So with the guideline selected, right-click on any color in the color palette and the guideline's color will change to that color when it is deselected. Also note that you can select multiple guidelines by selecting one and Shift-clicking to add others to the selection. Once you have multiple guidelines selected, you can move them together, rotate them together or change the color of all of them at once. Pretty cool, eh?

Using Guidelines

So far we've spent time creating guidelines, now it is time to put them to use. For them to be magnetic, you have to turn on Snap to Guidelines. This can be done on the Property Bar when nothing is selected by clicking the Snap to Guidelines button shown above. It's the one that has a blue dashed line to the left of a mini page. You'll find the same icon on the Property Bar used when a guideline is selected. Another method is to select View | Snap to Guidelines. Lastly, you can use the shortcut key of Alt-V U. Snap to Guidelines is a toggle setting so you can turn the snapping off using the exact same methods. Seeing the icon depressed is one way to know that snapping is turned on. Another indication is that a checkmark would be next to Snap to Guidelines in the View menu.

Now, draw a rectangle on your drawing page that is not close to the guideline. After you draw the rectangle, switch to the Pick tool. Click on the X in the middle of the rectangle and start moving it towards a guideline. Note that as you get close, the rectangle will jump and stick to the guideline. If you continue to drag, it will eventually unstick and continue to move past the guideline. Now draw another rectangle and this time draw it near the guideline. Notice how it jumps to the guideline as you draw.

Obviously these are simple examples of how guidelines can be used. Go ahead and try using other shapes, some text, and even moving nodes. You'll find that in every case, modifications are affected by the guidelines. Text is a special case as the bottom of text is considered the baseline. Therefore, descenders will go below the guideline. And you might find that text doesn't snap to the exact left or right. Instead it snaps to the bounding box surrounding the character. After you've worked with text and guidelines a few times, these special exceptions will be second nature to you.

You've seen just how guidelines can be used in your projects. Now we're going to go over some of the more advanced features. You'll see how to make adjustments in the Options dialog box, how you can automatically create sets of guidelines, having different guidelines on each page and how to make any object into a guideline.

Guideline Options

Detailed information on the guidelines in your document can be found by selecting Tools | Options | Document | Guidelines. Once in this part of the Options dialog box, you will find four major choices. We'll start by looking at Horizontal as shown at right.

If you select a guideline that already exists, you can delete it by pressing the Delete key in the dialog box. Another option is to type in a new location and press the Move button. Or you can simply type in a value and press the Add button to add a guideline at that location. If you simply want to get rid of all horizontal guidelines, press the Clear button. The dialog box for Vertical guidelines works just the same.

If we select the Guides tab, you'll find that the options are still the same as shown at right. But all horizontal, vertical and diagonal guidelines will be listed. The big addition here is diagonal guidelines. They can be specified with a single point and an angle or by two points. Any diagonal guideline will automatically be listed with both methods. Besides the slight difference in how diagonal guidelines are listed, all the other options are the same as those shown before.

Guideline Presets

Things start to get really exciting when we get to the Presets. First up are the Corel Presets shown at right. Each of the options provided is fairly self-explanatory. Check the options you want and click the Apply Presets button. Note that the guidelines created as presets will be green instead of the normal blue. For the last three options, you just have to try them to see exactly what they create. My preference would be to use the User Defined Presets instead for those options.

By selecting User Defined Presets, you get the dialog box shown at right. Note that I have activated all options just to make the dialog easier to read. The first setting controls guidelines defining the page margins. They default to zero meaning the guidelines would be right at the edge of the page. Also, the default is that top and bottom margins are equal as well as left and right being equal. By checking the Mirror margins checkbox, you can enter values for all four margins.

Below the margins is the area for defining columns. This section alone can save you the hassle of getting out a calculator. Type in the number of columns you want and how much space you want between the column guidelines. Automatically CorelDRAW will do the rest of the math for you.

Last up are the settings for a grid. You can either define the frequency of guidelines or the spacing between them. Horizontal and Vertical can be defined separately so that you get whatever kind of grid you like.

Obviously you can use all of these settings or you could choose to use only some of them. Once you have everything the way you want it, click Apply Presets and watch the guidelines start appearing on your page. Again, the preset guidelines are created in green to distinguish them from guidelines you create.

The Guidelines Layer

Guidelines are a special type of object and they have a layer all to themselves. To view the layers, select Windows | Dockers | Object Manager and you'll get something similar to the image at right. I've purposely shown a very simple document with a minimal number of objects. Note in the Master Page section is a layer named Guides. Typically this is where all guidelines are stored. As with any other layer, you can define several properties. By default, the Guideline layer is visible (the eye icon) and editable (the pencil icon) but it isn't printable (the printer icon). If you do want guidelines to print, simply click on the printer icon. For times when you don't want the guidelines to be altered, click the pencil icon and the layer will be locked.

One of the cool things about the Guideline layer is that any object you put on it will become a guideline. So if you want a guideline that is a circle, square or any other shape, simply draw that shape on the guideline layer. The only downside is that the entire object is not magnetic. Only the nodes will create snapping.

Local Guidelines

A feature that is often requested is the ability to have different guidelines on each page of a CorelDRAW file. Although it is undocumented, you can do this in CorelDRAW 10. On each page where you desire guidelines, you'll need a layer. So select the page in the Object Manager and add a layer. Now name that layer "Local Guidelines." With that layer selected, drag any guidelines you want from the rulers. Now follow the same procedures to create a Local Guidelines layer on other pages.

In Closing

This article has shown you all the tricks for creating guidelines and just how useful they can be in your projects. Now you'll be able to draw things in the exact locations you want. You'll never have to worry again about getting things aligned. Guidelines will make things easier if you just put them to use.

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_{Last Updated
Wednesday, March 21, 2007.}

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