Change color of individual guides / Guides from geometric shapes

[_Peter_]

When setting up master pages I come to a point where I have so much guides that I am starting to get confused which guid was for what... For picture, textframes, etc.

A possibility to assign different colors to guides with different meanings would be helpful to keep the orientation. e.g. all blue guides are for image alignment, red is for textframes, yellow for other design elements etc. Would it be possible to assign colors to guides?

 

Is it possible to use geometric shapes as guides? Rectangular, triangular, circular etc? Or non-vertical, non-horizontal? E.g. I would like to have a 45° textframe stripe on a top corner of some pages, but not of all. Or a round bubble at a certain position of some pages, not of all...

I think guides from geometric shapes would also help to keep the screen clean of "unnecessary" guides lines in some cases, as often I don´t need the whole vertical or horizontal line over both facing pages. I think also for geometric shape guides assigning different color would help for better overview.

Maybe this feature is already included and I just did not find it?

 

[GarryP]

You can use multiple master pages to create different 'guide sets' for different parts of your layout.

For instance, you can put your column guides - for text frames - on one master page, your image guides on another master page, and your other guides on yet another.
Apply all the relevant master pages to the spread(s) - remembering to uncheck "Replace Existing" (if necessary) - and then delete the master pages - via the Layers studio, not the Master Pages studio - that you don't need at that time in the spread you're working on. You can re-apply the master pages you need at any time.

Doing it this way means that you only have the guides showing that you need at any time, rather than having a mass of differently coloured guides.

Note: Just hiding a master page - via the Layers studio - only hides the layers (objects) in the master page and not the guides.
Tip: You can quickly apply a master page to a spread by dragging the master page - from the Master Pages studio - over the relevant spread in the Pages studio. And better still, you can Ctrl+drag a master page to apply the master page without replacing those that have been applied previously. A big time-saver if you have lots of master pages.

I've found that this has worked well for me in previous builds but I haven't yet used it in any meaningful way with the latest build (221), after major changes to how master pages work. Best to experiment in a throw-away copy of your document first.