The Guiding Line

[ LiB ]

Aligning artwork, text, and other objects on your Stage can be a useful capability. Let's say you have to make sure that all your text on the Stage is divided evenly into three columns. Because Flash doesn't support tables of any kind, this could be tricky.

When rulers are turned on in Flash (View > Rulers or CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-R; OPT-SHIFT-CMD-R on Mac), you can create a guide to help you align and organize your artwork. To create a guide, click a ruler and drag onto your stage. You can make both vertical and horizontal guides to lend a hand, and the best part is that they are not part of your exported SWF movie. They're just there to help and nothing more. Isn't that sweet?

These guys don't respond to CTRL-Z (Undo), so to remove a guide line, drag it back onto the ruler from whence it came, and it disappears.

[ LiB ]