Guide Line Improvements

[Graphical Chris]

I very rarely use guides in all Affinity apps, not because I don't need to, but because the guides are not user unfriendly.  Instead I am always drawing shapes and lines and make them my guides instead for the following reasons:

1) You can't select guides off the canvas.  If you have a lot of content on your canvas, selecting a guide is near impossible, you keep selecting other artwork components.  Sure, you can open the guides panel to select and then type and move a guide, but if you want to drag a guide or select and align a guide to something else, you can't.  It would be good to see the guide go off the canvas so you can easliy select it.

2) Guides don't highlight when selected.  You can't tell if you have selected a guide, which also causes issues with tyhe above point 1.

3) Be good to select multiple guides at once to be able to drag them elsewhere on your canvas, but you can only select one guide at a time.  Selecting more than one guide is very useful when you need to keep particular width or height.  Instead, I draw a box and move this where ever I need it, but the guides would be better.

4) To be able to align guides the same as you do with objects on the canvas and maybe even treat guides as an object that will appear in the layers panel so you can lock or hide the guide.

5) Guide panel to be able to place this as a permanent panel to any of the side tool panels.  At the moment it is a floating box.

[carl123]

10 minutes ago, Graphical Chris said:

If you have a lot of content on your canvas, selecting a guide is near impossible, you keep selecting other artwork components.

Guides can be selected and moved in the Ruler area(s)

 

[Graphical Chris]

Thanks Carl123,

That solves selection issues.

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, carl123 said:

Guides can be selected and moved in the Ruler area(s)

In the case of Windows, this method of control is a bit non-standard - the user would assume that after moving the mouse over the guide, the cursor changes to a double arrow. This does not happen with Windows, or it only flashes in a specific location for a very short moment. In the attached video, this happens only in just a few moments. The cursor changes to a double arrow only when you grab the guide.

 

 

Edited November 24, 2023 by Pšenda