Subtitles of the Movie

Here I'm going to talk about Smart Guides. Smart Guides is a feature that was introduced in InDesign CS4 and it really is a terrific feature. You use it every day and it just makes life easier. It saves a lot of clutter and it seems so simple now, I'm so used to it, I don't know what I'd do without it. So, in the previous movies I've shown you how to draw Guides and I still use Guides even with Smart Guides, but Smart Guides just makes the little things easier. So, having said all that I'll show you what it is. I have the Smart Guides turned Off but if you want to turn them on you go to the View Menu and you can choose Grids and Guides and come down here and choose Smart Guides. I had to search for it there because I don't use that. I come over here to the Application Bar and if I want them on I simply click there. It's checked now so it's definitely on. So, what is it? Let me zoom in here, on this object on the page. These are Guides that are created on the fly by InDesign to help you position things so if I select this and start moving, look at that Guide coming up when I'm in the center of the column. It's actually the center of the page as well. If I move over here there's a Guide letting me know that it's in the center of that column, even in the center of a Gutter. Look at that. That Guide's just come in here, come to another one over here. There you can see the left side is showing up as a center now and there the right side shows up. So it guesses of what you need to know. If I come down here, a little bit like this and there's the Guide and you can see as I get to the center of the page it's right in the crosshairs now. Now I know it's on both the Vertical and Horizontal center of the page. So, this is so easy and such a great feature. Now I don't have the clutter of all the Guides on the page when I need them because I'll just position it in here and there's the bottom to the center of the page, center to the center of the page, top to the center of the page, vertically as well as horizontally. So, there's really more to it than that, so let me just scroll down to the other page where I've got more objects. Not only do they align to the Guides on the page, they align to each other, so if I take this one here and I'm moving this object beside it, look how it aligns right like that. We see the Guides coming in here. We can see how the center's now aligned to the bottom, down this side. This object's aligned there, moving over there, the center, to the left-hand side of that, just like that. So that is great. So if I wanted to align the four objects here I'll just drag this one up like this and then I've got these two here - let me just select both of them, mov them up a little closer - I can align this one up here, hold down the Ctrl or Cmd to select both of them, it's actually the Shift, sorry about that and drag them up and there they are, all four perfectly aligned. Now these happen to be the same size so they're easily aligned like that. If I were to come over down like that I can align them perfectly. So, it's not just the alignment. We can do the spacing. Let's just move this out of the way. Here I can put this one like this. Now when I move this one up here, watch those arrows. You see those arrows in between them? It's telling me that spacing between them is exactly the same. So if I move this one over like this, the spacing's the same there, so this spacing is even. And there's more to it than that. Now if I want to rotate - let's take this one and rotate it - I'll rotate it like this. Now you can maybe just see it. It's pretty hard to see. Let me actually undo that and zoom in for you because I want you to see the rotation angle. It's located about here, as I start rotating. Can you see those two lines there? That's giving me the rotation angle, whatever that is. So I'll select that, then I'll come over to this one, start rotating it and look at the image of the fajitas on the left and when that rotation angle is exactly the same in the two of these, look at that. It shows up, I can release and these are rotated exactly the same angle. They're the same to this one. I could use the Repeat Function to do this but since we're talking about Smart Guides let's go ahead and do it. Again, I'm looking at the image on the left with the nachos and there it is, you can see the green line showing it's the same. I can release it and we'll just do it to this last one here, select, start rotating, there it goes, the angle's the same. Zoom out a little bit - Ctrl- or Cmd-Minus and they're all lined up, spacing between them is exactly the same, the rotation angle's the same and I haven't turned On a Guide. So, Smart Guides is a great feature. I do have one criticism. I have yet to find a way to turn it off temporarily. I think if we had a Shortcut key for that it would be great because sometimes it snaps into something you don't really want it to snap into and it would be nice to override it temporarily rather than have to come up and turn it on or off from there each time. But, other than that, it is a great time saver.