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Drag reference lines onto the canvas to align and snap your construction against.
A guide is a straight reference line you place on the canvas to line things up against. A horizontal guide runs left-to-right at a fixed height; a vertical guide runs up-and-down at a fixed position. Guides are non-printing helpers - they don't become geometry, nothing you build depends on them, and they're left out of SVG export. They stick with your file, though: they save, undo, can be selected, and appear in the Layers panel like other objects.
Turn on rulers first (View > Show Rulers), then drag inward from a ruler:
- Press inside the top ruler band and drag down to pull out a horizontal guide.
- Press inside the left ruler band and drag in to pull out a vertical guide.
The guide follows your cursor and drops where you release. Release back over the ruler band and it's discarded. Guides draw as thin cyan lines over your geometry, and you can hide or show them all with View > Show Guides (remembered between sessions) - or with ⌘; without leaving the keyboard. Hiding guides doesn't blind you while you work with one: with Show Guides off, a guide you have selected, or one you are dragging out of a ruler, still draws until you deselect it. So you can pull a new guide, watch it land, and nudge it into place with the arrow keys while the others stay out of sight. Hidden guides are otherwise left alone - they can't be clicked or marquee-selected.
You don't have to place a guide by eye. When you create one, you can type an exact coordinate for where it lands - the X for a vertical guide, the Y for a horizontal one, in your current unit - instead of dragging it off the ruler and nudging it into place. Handy when you already know the position you want.
- Reposition: select a guide and drag it to a new spot. It snaps as it goes: to the ends of any visible segment or arc, to crossings, and to an edge running parallel to the guide under your cursor - so you can lay a guide along a shape's flat side as readily as through its corners. Realized geometry counts, so a guide lands on a realized tile like anything else.
- Nudge with the arrow keys: select a guide and press an arrow key to step it, the same way a selected point nudges. Up and Down move a horizontal guide; Left and Right move a vertical guide. The step is the nudge step from Settings, in your current unit (default 0.1); hold Shift to move ten times as far, or Option (Mac) / Alt for a tenth of the step. Each press is one undo step, and points and guides selected together nudge in the same step. A locked guide stays put.
- Type an exact position: open a guide in the Layers panel and edit its coordinate directly - X for a vertical guide, Y for a horizontal one, in your current unit. Since guides are hand-placed, this value is always editable.
- Lock them all: press ⌘⇧; to lock every guide at once (or unlock them all if any are already locked) - a quick way to freeze your alignment lines so you don't nudge one while working, then free them again. A locked guide still snaps; it just can't be dragged.
- Delete: remove it like any other object.
"Locked" is a persistent setting, not just a one-off toggle on the guides you have now: ⌘⇧; also flips whether new guides come out locked. So once you've locked your guides to freeze them in place, the next guide you pull off a ruler locks itself the moment you finish placing it - whether you drop it by eye or type its exact coordinate - instead of landing unlocked and waiting to be swept up by the next ⌘⇧;. Unlock, and new guides go back to landing free. Either way it's still just the one shortcut.
Turn on Edit > Snap to Guides (it sits alongside Snap to Points and Snap to Intersections) and new points will latch onto nearby guides as you place or drag them - the x pulls onto the nearest vertical guide, the y onto the nearest horizontal one, each independently. It works both while placing an object and while dragging a free point. Point and intersection snaps take priority over guide snaps when several are in range. Show Guides has to be on for guide-snapping to apply, and the toggle resets each session.
You get visual confirmation when a snap catches:
- A plain snap onto one guide shows a filled blue dot.
- A snap that lands on a genuine crossing shows a circle-and-cross marker: the same mark used for regular intersections. A crossing is either two guides meeting, or a guide crossing a piece of your construction.
Tip
Because a guide's line is treated as infinite, you can snap to where it crosses one of your curves and drop a real point there - a quick way to mark an alignment without building extra construction.
Guides count in general intersection testing too, not just this preview: click near where a guide crosses your geometry with the Point tool (or while picking a point for any other drawing tool) and you land exactly on that crossing, the same as clicking a crossing of two ordinary objects. A guide can't be a parent the way a real object can - the point it gives you is a plain free point, not one that tracks the guide - but it's a first-class crossing for the purpose of landing a click precisely. The hover preview says so too: over a guide crossing you get the crossing marker rather than the green on-object ring, and the crossing is preferred over an alignment snap if both are in range.
Note
Dragging guides in requires rulers to be visible. If you can't pull one out, check that View > Show Rulers is on. See Rulers.
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