Inspiring

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Why are my guides disappearing when I select them?

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(Mac Catalina, Illus. 24.0.1)

Why are my guides disappearing when I select them?

If I click on my artboard they reappear.

What's going on?

Bug

jacobl54338525Correct answer

Participant

Thanks Kurt! Show/Hide Edges (ctrl+H) did the trick for me. Toggling the Real Time Drawing setting on and off did not prevent the guides from vanishing, neither did switching from Previewing on CPU or GPU.

Participating Frequently

In Illustrator 27.01, it seems to help to turn Snap to Grid off. Then, when you hover over the guides, you get the little guide title:

And when you select the guide, it stays visible (and turns pink).

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Participant

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richardf48537383

Participating Frequently

I just updated to the latest version of Illustrator 24.2.3 and yes, when you click to move a guide... be that a guide you created from a shape or simply one you have dragged out from the ruler ... it vanishes.

Once again, I'm going to have to move to a legacy version of Illustrator.

I can't count the number of times I have had to do this. I keep hoping that when I update there's not going to be a bug that renders is useless... well, this is one of those bugs.

For an illustrator like me - who needs precision - and uses guides on a daily basis ... it's now completely USELESS.

I dream of a day when the team at Adobe stop destroying their own apps.

They have all got worse in my opinion... bar none.

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Community Expert

Community Expert

Vote here:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-bugs/suggestions/39740689-realtime-preview-makes-rulers-and-objects-disappea

And you can use these workarounds in the meantime:

Switch to Outline preview or CPU preview to see what you are moving and creating a special layer for guides and putting the layer in outline preview works too.

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richardf48537383

Participating Frequently

Appreciate the work-around Ton thanks.

Just noticed when you move text - the bounding box vanishes as well.

Do Adobe not understand their users?.. after all this time. We need bounding boxes/guides/edges so we can align items -- Not sure I understand the justification for all this removal of edges/boxes/etc

Anyway... nothing will change., it never does. So we're stuck with it.

LEGACY version here I come.. again.

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Participating Frequently

I'm on version 24.2.1, Windows Pro 10 x64, and have the same problem which was occuring in the previous versions too. Whenever I select the guides, they disappear and it's pretty difficult to position them where I need them to be. The edges are showing, so this is not causing the problem. Anyone who found out how to sort this? And the layer colour and the colour of the guide are definitely not the same. I can see the guides fine as long as I'm not selecting/moving them. Which really beats the point of them if I can't easily place them where they need to be.

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-- * -- More colour-coded stuff in all Adobe apps, please. --*--

Community Expert

Community Expert

See the answer by Ton.

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Participating Frequently

Aha, yes. It works on a CPU preview. Pretty foolish to have to go around this...

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-- * -- More colour-coded stuff in all Adobe apps, please. --*--

Inspiring

check the layer colour. maybe your layer is 'white' so when you select a guide it shows its selection colour of white / dissapears?

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Community Expert

Community Expert

Are you sure you have Illustrator 24.0.1?

In the most recent update 24.1 there is a feature Real Time Drawing, which shows you the preview of objects while moving.

But the preview of a guide or other objects that have no fill or stroke or an object with a white fill and no stroke means that they disappear when moved.

Looks like a bug to me. Switch to Outline preview or CPU preview to see what you are moving seems a workaround

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Participant

I actually only saw my guides when dragging them once Real Time Drawing was turned off.

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Participating Frequently

Thank you so much for mentioning this. I am using Adobe illustrator 2021 version 25.0.1 and I couldn't figure out why my guides kept disappearing when moving to save my life. I hardly ever chance system preferences so I'm not sure if it noticed the "Real-time Drawing and Editing" option in previous versions. However, in previous versions, I never had the disappearing guide issue while moving them. Now I'm curious as to what "Real-time Drawing and Editing is and why is it needed. As for now, I will keep it unchecked since turning it off seemed to solve the problem. Thanks for mentioning!

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Community Expert

Community Expert

Does View > Show Edges help?

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Johnny SokkoAuthor

Inspiring

No, but I'm beginning to think I'm working on a corrupted file. Any new file I create does not appear to have this problem.

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