Smart Guides

Smart Guides allow you to quickly and easily align, size, position, and rotate objects in your documents.

There are two main kinds of Smart Guides: Smart Alignment Guides and Smart Distance Guides. These guides can be turned on and off in the Format menu.

Smart Alignment Guides allow two different types of alignment: positional alignment and rotational alignment.



Positional alignment aligns objects in reference to their alignment points. While dragging an object, when it becomes aligned with another object in the active canvas, a smart guide will appear and the object will try to snap in place.



Rotational alignment aligns objects in reference to other rotated shapes in the active canvas. While changing the rotation of a object, if the angle matches the rotation angle of another object, the matching angle will appear on the other shape and the shape you are rotating will try to snap to that angle.

Smart Distance Guides allow distances between objects and object sizes to be matched.



To match the distances between objects, if you move an object toward two other placed objects when the distance between the two placed objects matches the distance between the moving object and the object closest to it, distance guides will appear showing the seperation distance, and the moving object will snap to that distance from the closest shape.



To match the size of objects refers to matching the width or height of objects. When resizing a shape, if the width or height matches the width or height of another object in the canvas, distance size guides will appear along the dimension that is matching on both objects and the object being resized will try to snap to that size.