Aligning Shapes to Guides and Guide Points

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When you design a template, you can help your users work more efficiently by including guides or guide points on the drawing page. Guides are the nonprinting lines on the Microsoft Visio drawing page used for alignment, as the following figure shows. Defined as infinite lines, guides behave much like regular lines in that they can have associated text and they support the use of styles. A guide point is the crossbar-shaped guide dragged from the intersection of the two rulers. Users can quickly align and move shapes by gluing them to a guide or guide point—when a guide is moved, all shapes glued to it also move.

Figure 11-3 You can glue a point, a side, or the middle of a two-dimensional shape to a guide.

Guidelines for Using Guides or Grids

Guides and grids offer different approaches to aligning shapes on a page. Generally, guides offer more flexibility than grids. The following table offers some tips for deciding whether to use grids, guides, or both for your design goals.

For details about using grids for aligning shapes, see Designing a Grid earlier in this chapter, and Using Alignment Boxes to Snap Shapes to a Grid later in this chapter.

Comparison of guides and grids

Guide or grid	Guide support	Grid support feature
Discrete objects	Guides and guide points are discrete objects whose appearance and behavior can be controlled by formulas.	Grid lines are not discrete objects, and therefore you cannot set properties or write formulas for them.
Rotation	Guides can be rotated with respect to the page by entering a value for Angle in the Size & Position window (on the View menu, click Size & Position Window).	Grid lines always appear horizontal and vertical with respect to the window, not thepage.
Grid and guide intervals	Guides can be manually positioned at any interval.	Grid lines are always displayed in even intervals.
Printing	Guides can be printed by clearing the Non-printing shape check box in the Behavior dialog box (on the Format menu, click Behavior).	Grid lines cannot be printed.

Manipulating Guides and Guide Points

The geometry of a guide is represented as a single InfiniteLine row in its ShapeSheet spreadsheet. Like regular lines, you can apply styles to guides; by default, guides use the predefined Guide style. You can easily manipulate guides on the page.

When you create a guide, it is parallel to the ruler from which you dragged it. Rulers are always vertical and horizontal with respect to the window, not the page, so if you create a guide in a rotated page, the guide might be rotated with respect to the page you place it on.

To create a guide

• Point to either the horizontal or vertical ruler with the mouse. The pointer changes to a two-headed arrow. Drag to where you want the guide on the drawing page and release the mouse button.

To create a guide point

• Drag from the intersection of the two rulers (not two guides).

To select a guide on the drawing page

• Click the guide with the Pointer tool. The guide turns green. You can then move it, delete it, display the Size & Position window (on the View menu, click Size & Position Window) to rotate it or specify its position and orientation, or open a ShapeSheet window showing its properties.

To position a guide precisely on the page

• Use formulas. For example, in a drawing on A5 paper at a 1:500 scale, the page width represents 74 meters. You can position the guide with respect to page width with a formula such as the following:

•  PinX = ThePage!PageWidth-5m 

To turn the display of guides for a document on or off

• On the View menu, click Guides.

To disable snapping to guides for a document

1. On the Tools menu, click Snap & Glue.
2. On the General tab, under Snap to, clear the Guides check box.

Guides in a Rotated Page

When you create a guide, it is always parallel to the ruler you dragged it from. Rulers are always vertical and horizontal with respect to the window, not the page, so if you create a guide in a rotated page, the guide appears rotated with respect to the page you place it on.

To specify a guide's angle of rotation

• With the guide selected, display the Size & Position window (on the View menu, click Size & Position Window), and then enter a value for Angle. Alternatively, you can select the guide, select the Rotation tool , and then rotate it.

Like shapes, a guide's Shape Transform section records the point around which the guide rotates in the PinX and PinY cells and the angle of rotation in the Angle cell. A shape that is glued to a guide has an Alignment section, which refers to the guide with a formula that includes the INTERSECTX or INTERSECTY function.

Grouping Guides with Shapes

You can use guides or guide points to align shapes and groups as you develop masters. For example, you can group a shape and a guide. When you open the group window to edit the group (to do so, select the group, and then on the Edit menu, click Open Group), the guide appears. The guide makes it easy to align additional shapes relative to the other shapes in the group.

If a shape is glued to a guide and you add the shape (but not the guide) to a group, the shape's connection to the guide breaks. The reverse is also true: If you add a guide to a group, but don't also add the shapes that are glued to it, the shapes' connections to that guide break. If you include both the guide and the shapes that are glued to it in the group, the connections are maintained.