Basic things: units, rulers, guides.

[JustARalf]

I am not sure if this is the right place for my post. I started doing design work with Photoshop and Freehand and later, when Adobe first bought and subsequently killed Freehand, with Illustrator. A few months ago I played around with Designer and Photo on both, an iMac and an iPad, and liked the experience. Most of all I liked that finally someone tried to come up with an alternative to Adobe. Sadly, since I decided to try and do a real paying design job on an iPad Pro using Designer and Photo my experience has been quite frustrating. Rather than doing actual design I had to search forums for the most basic (in my opion) features. Changing units from pt to mm? “Resize” in my opinion is a quite unlikely spot. Want pagerulers? No, this feature hasn’t made its way to the iPad yet. I am aware that I am surely stuck in the Adobe logic of where I expect to find certain functions and tools and how I expect them to operate but I am most certainly not the only one. As things stand right now with every step I want to make design wise I have to expect it to either not work or only after a considerable amount of time in the forums, this, simply, isn’t an option and step by step it takes me closer to goodbye Affinity and a sad hello Illustrator.

In terms of actually asking something:
- Rulers: really (really?) still not implemented in both iPad apps?
- Guides: is there way to add guides to a specific artboard at a desired position without mathematical shenanigans? How can I edit and remove specific guides?

[Callum]

Hi JustARalf,

Welcome to the forums

Rulers isn't implemented in the iPad versions at the moment however they are on our RoadMap to be added in a future version. To remove a Guide select the Guide button from the file menu and then tap the guide you want to edit or delete you can then use the delete button found towards the the bottom of the app to remove the guide. There is no way to add a guide to a specific Art Board yet however its something that has been requested in the past and so may be added in a future version.

Thanks

Callum

[JustARalf]

Thanks, Callum.

[JustARalf]

Adding quasi-guides in Photo:
Since I’ve been ranting and raving about Photo’s lack of useful guides I thought I ought to share my little workaround. It isn’t very convenient and I happily accept suggestions how to do it more easily but here’s the idea:
- select the pen tool, then, in the dialogue where it says “pen” choose “line”
- draw a black line where you want your guide (or manually adjust the x and y-coordinates for both ends)
- in layers studio convert this line to a group, set it to “Contrast negate”, lock it
- if you haven‘t done already, now‘s the time to enable snapping

You can add additional lines, circles and whatnot to this group and as long as it is on top you‘ll always see the lines. Major drawbacks: don‘t forget to hide or delete before exporting for print, manually keeping this layer on top of everthing is a little bit tedious.