Guides and snapping

[robertp67326315]

I am a beginner, trying to get to grips with the Framemaker demo. How can you set up guides and get things snapping to them? I found instructions on a non-Adobe site saying that you create guides by dragging from a ruler, but that doesn't work.

[Bob_Niland]

If FM has guides (as Illustrator & Photoshop do), it's news to me.

FM does have Snap, and it's in the on-line help.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

What version of FM are you using? Let's start with that.

[robertp67326315 · Accepted solution]

I'm using the demo, so it's the latest, version 16. I was really trying to ask for the absolute basics on snapping, which turns out to be View → Options (esc v o) to set up snapping to grid.

[robertp67326315]

And also, for anyone else with the same question as me, there is "gravity", rather than "snap", for getting objects to line up with each other. https://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/using-framemaker/user-guide/WSd817046a44e105e21e63e3d1...

[K.Daube]

Hi Robert,

If you need guiding lines to arrange certain object, you may have a look at https://www.daube.ch/docu/files/compendium.pdf#page=235

FM itself has only the mechanism of rulers (View > Rulers or View > Options > Rulers).

Their origin is top left corner of paper - not current text frame and hence positioning indentation and tabs relative to the pargraph-starat is cumbersome.

The rulers on top may be handy for quick-and-dirty setting of indentation and tab positions. The ruler on the left side is (IMHO) not of great use.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

The Snap option works, but snaps to the ruler or grid set up, not to an individual guide (as no user-defined guides exist in FrameMaker)

You can set the ruler increments and the grid increments as needed to acheive your goal.

Not as elegant as InDesign, but serviceable.

-Matt

[Bob_Niland]

Matt: …but snaps to the ruler or grid set up…

Does the output, say to PDF, also snap the text/object page coordinates to the output resolution specified?

At the typical JobOption "Resolution" of 1200 or 2400 dpi, it's probably not going to matter. But if someone happened to use a JO set to 150 or 300, I'm wondering (not ever having tested it), if snapping might get coarse on output, if not also during edit (with that printer model configured).

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Hi Bob, are you asking about what happens upon output to PDF or other formats?

I don't believe the Snap setting has impact on those features, as the positioning with the Fm page has previously been set (both with and/or without the Snap setting).

Please let me know if I misunderstood your point regarding resolution.

-Matt

[Bob_Niland]

Matt: I don't believe the Snap setting has impact on those features,…

Yep. I just ran some tests, and Snap appears to only control user actions, and not the coordinate resolution in the FM document of any resulting output.

It took some time to run the tests, because creating a modified JobOption doesn't seem to be storing it anywhere that FM2019 or FM2020 is currently looking for it. I had to manually copy it from:
c:/Users/{username}/Roaming/Framemaker/16/Additional_PDF_Settings/
into
c:/Users/{username}/Roaming/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings/

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

There's a video for that... 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5-Nl7sMvoE