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Hi,

 

I just learned about your amazing software today, and I've downloaded the trails and watched your videos in Vimeo. Great stuff! I've been wanting to get out and away from Adobe, so as soon as Publisher is released it will be possible. 

 

Anyways, I have a question about creating guides. Is it possible to create guides like the inDesign "Create Guides" feature? Where you can specify how man rows and columns and gutter space?

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You can either drag guides out from the rulers or use View > Guides Manager.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Definitely a required feature for grid-based designs. InDesign, Photoshop, Photoline: they all have a similar guide creator. In Illustrator it is a matter of using Split into Grid, and then convert to guides. Ideally such guide systems should be definable based on selections as well. Inkscape supports guide extensions which create guide grids too.

 

Such a feature is simple to implement, and would not take up a lot of development time. However, I guess many other more urgent things swallow up the devs' time, so it is understandable.

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Both AP & AD have a Grid & Axis Manager & a Guides Manager, accessible from the View menu.

 

The Grid & Axis Manager has both basic & advanced modes, allowing the creation of a wide variety of standard & custom rectilinear, isometric, triangular, & even 3 axis grid types (although I have yet to figure out how to set the third "up" axis).  The only problem with it for me is the grid lines are so faint & thin that I can barely see them. To work around that, I start off with a temporary background layer set to a deep blue so I can see the grid when I set it up. It's clumsy but since like almost everything else in Affinity updates are live so whatever I do in the manager is updated immediately on the canvas, it isn't too bad.

 

The Guides Manager allows setting horizontal & vertical guide lines numerically in whatever units you want (pixels, inches, etc.) or as a percent of the canvas size. Since it can be tedious to create each guide numerically, I usually start by dragging them out from the rulers to the approximate locations I want & do any fine tuning for precision work in the manager. Toggling on & off the percent display mode is particularly useful when I want to see how the guides set by units relate to the canvas size or visa versa.

 

Neither manager allows defining by selections or conversion of one type to the other.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I would be happy if Designer & Photo just let me set darker or thicker, higher contrast grid lines, but I don't really do much page layout work.

 

There are several places where relatively low contrast in the UI is becoming increasingly problematic. As I recently learned, this is because the ability to perceive contrast differences gradually diminishes with age, beginning somewhere in the mid-thirties, so this will eventually become a problem for everyone.

 

Since it has been decades since I was that young, for a small fee I would be happy to serve as a consultant to Affinity for UI design.  :lol:

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • Staff

The OP question was about layout guides in general (desktop publishing).

There will be improvements to Designer's guides too (lock, change colour, origin point etc) but i was trying to address the op's question in first place.

As i said, eventually some features may become available for Designer too ported back from Publisher's implementation. I don't know much details about this yet.

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  • 4 years later...

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