Screen alignment helper lines

[Wish I Was Running]

Adobe InDesign, and PageMaker before it, have/had a helpful feature allowing users to place view-only horizontal and vertical lines over a document. You simply clicked on the horizontal or vertical ruler on the side of the page and dragged, and the line would appear and move to wherever you stopped dragging it. These were very helpful for aligning objects and columns and i.e. locating the centerline of a page. I'm sorry -- I cannot remember what this feature is called ...

Does Adobe FrameMaker 10 have any similar feature? (I could use it!)

Thanks for any help you can share...

[Bob_Niland]

> I cannot remember what this feature is called ...

Guides

I doubt that FM has added it since FM9 (which is the highest I've used).

FM does have Rulers and Grid, enabled through the View menu.

[Arnis Gubins]

Unfortuantely FM doesn't have any true guidelines available as in ID or even Acrobat.

However, you can create your own that can be toggled on/off with a simple shortcut.

The first step is to use FM's View > Color > Definitions... to create a new colour (I typically just use Magenta) and give it a name "Guides" (or whatever you want).

Then use FM's View > Color > Views... to define View 6 to have the Guides set to be Invisible.

Now you can use FM's drawing tools (line tool) to position horizontal and vertical guidelines using the "Guides" colour. Use the shift key to constrain the darwing movement to horizintal or vericatl when drawing the guides.

If you draw these guidelines on your Master pages, they will be available on all document pages that use the respective Master page.

To toggle the guidelines ON (i.e. visible) use <esc> v 1 and to toggle OFF use <esc> v 6. (These toggles also work at the book level for all files at once.)

[Wish I Was Running]

I solved my immediate problem by using the alignment feature. Displaying the gridlines also helped... I also tried drawing a line from the top of the page, intending for it to be a center line. Getting it perfectly straight was tricky, and I'm not wild about drawing lines where no lines should remain, even though it's easy to delete them.

[Arnis Gubins]

You have to hold down the Shift to draw a perfectly straight horizontal or vertical line.

Using the colour views toggles the guideline on or off. When it is off (i.e. invisible) you never see it nor does it print. Treat these as FM's "layers".

You can also use the Gravity option to have items jump to the guides.

I do this all of the time for graphics intensive catalogs.

[Bob_Niland]

> Getting it perfectly straight was tricky ...

In addition to Shift+draw, you can also just take your best shot, then set the Width or Height to 0.0 in Graphics Properties. That dialog also let's you position the line precisely on the page.