Straighten Me Out
Maybe I’m obsessive, but few things in InDesign annoy me more than a line or frame that’s almost straight. Something that’s just a teeny bit “off” is like an itch I have to scratch. It can happen when someone selects an edge or endpoint with the Direct Selection tool and drags or nudges with an arrow key. Sometimes it can be hard to notice when frames or lines are just slightly askew.
A corner point of one of these frames is 1 pt off, but at 100% magnification, you can’t see it.
But if you zoom in or out, the culprit is revealed.
One of the lines below is slightly diagonal. If you select them with the Direct Selection tool it can be hard to see which one, regardless of your magnification level.
But if you use the Selection tool, you can spot it a mile away.
When the lines are given a stroke, it’s even more apparent which one is different. With a diagonal line, you get the full set of control handles instead of just the two at the ends of the line.
There’s one more clue. Look at the Reference Point in the Control panel. You can see whether a line is vertical,
horizontal
or diagonal (even by just .001 pt)
So now that you’ve found these things, how do you fix them quickly so you can get on with obsessing about other things? Go to the Object menu and choose Convert Shape > Rectangle. Any points inside the object’s bounding box are moved out to the edges of the bounding box to make a perfect rectangle. It also works with multiple frames selected.
So you can go from this
To this
For lines, choose Convert Shape > Orthogonal Line. This former Obscure Feature of the Week-eek-eek will make the line perfectly vertical or horizontal.
You can also find the Convert to Rectangle and Orthogonal Line commands in the Pathfinder panel.
Ahh, that feels much better.
…so that’s why that’s there! Aha!
Thank you Mike! Our new PlateSetter has settled a lot of this type of problem that developed at output.
I have spent years trying to make certain that page items were correctly aligned but it seemed to take a lot of effort to fix the problem if it was on my end. I’ve learned to love the shift key! Using the reference point has to be the easiest way to discover true culprits. Much of my work involves creating forms and that involves a lot of lines.
I’m hoping the next version of InDesign will allow you to select and align points on a path like you can do in Illustrator CS4. There have been times that I’ve copied objects into AI to aligns points properly then pasted them back in ID.
Jennie-
Glad to help :)
Somerset-
I know what you mean, it feels like there should be the same ability to align points in InDesign. The Make Rectangle command is limited in that it only aligns points to the bounding box. Better than nothing, but not as flexible as AI.
@Somerset: Yes, I agree too. Adobe, are you listening?
Can you not select the first node you want to align to – note the x y co-ords, then select other nodes and input the appropriate x y location. Then those nodes are moved to the x y location and the other nodes remain where they are.
Bit awkward – but a workaround – if I understood the problem.
Harbs – I feel a script coming on!
Hmm, er, well — shouldn’t someone soon mention that the new and splendid Smart Guides in CS4 makes it a snap to properly re-align slightly-off lines too? Yes, I think so.
Klaus-
I love CS4’s Smart Guides, but they don’t snap my lines into perfect vertical or horizontal alignment. They’re always off by a miniscule amount. SG’s seem to work better for frames, but sometimes I find myself dragging around in search of a SG, which never appears.
@Eugene:
Actually, this is one of those areas where the scripting DOM is a little lacking. There’s no way to know which points are currently selected.
The only way to script this would be for the script to guess which path segments are “supposed” to be straight. I guess the way to do that would be within a certain number of degrees of orthogonal. What should the magic number be?
Mike, I tested this before I wrote my post — and now again, double- and triple-checking. I draw a rectangle, mess up its four corners with the Direct Selection, then use the Smart Guides to re-align them again. And they always fall perfectly into line, with three decimals’ worth of precision. So I never see your “miniscule amount” of error.
Klaus-
I’m jealous. I use SG’s all the time to align page elements, and I can’t even imagine going back toCS3 and living without them. But if I start with a diagonal line, select an endpoint with the Direct Selection tool, and drag it till I get a SG, it is never exactly aligned with the other point. It’s always about .5 pt off. Weird. I wonder if its a Windows v. Mac thing. Or maybe its based on monitor resolution? I just thought it was buggy/lame. But now that it works for you, I want to figure it out.
Mike, I’m on Win Vista, and my page units are, most sensibly, set to millimeters (not those damn inches all you Americans waste your lives with) and my screen is running at 1920×1200. And that’s the extent of my secret sauce, I’m afraid.
Yes, long live SGs — the single greatest efficiency-feature in ID CS4!
As a European, I use points and picas (and therefore inches) all the time. An inch = 72 (Adobe) points, which is divisible into 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18 and 36 equal subdivisions without decimal remainders, which is perfect for layout. But a centimetre = 10 millimeters, which is only divisible into 2 and 5 equal subdivisions without decimal remainders.
Yep, this European thinks inches are objectively better than the decimal system equivalent!
Mike, I have so far done all my testing with rectangles and polygons, and things work splendidly. But now I tried your simple diagonal line — and, sadly, you’re right! The SG’s alignment is always off by a . . . “miniscule amount”. Sad and weird. I think this should be filed as a bug!
Harbs is correct, the points issue is a bit lacking, but I found a way to bypass it.
Here’s a link to the beta of my Pointaligner script.
It’s still in primer stage, and you’ll probably run into several issues that I didn’t account for, but it works.
@Adi: Kudos to you! Very, very tricky! ;)
I should have thought of that…
I find it useful to have keyboard shortcuts for ‘convert to rectangle’ and ‘convert to ellipse’. That way, I can easily make rectangles and ellipses by pressing just 1 or 2 keys, and change between them easily (which is something I do a lot of).
Thank you for the tips Mike and for confirming that I’m not the only one worried about such minutiae! It’s very lonely working in an office where many people don’t even use snap to guides.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to get CS4 last week and discover that InDesign now has Smart Guides, albeit not as fully realized as in Illustrator. It’s a start!
Haha
Is something broken?
I dragged a line on an angle and applied Create Orthogonal Line. I got an error message “Requested value is not a legal dimension.”
I created an angled line with the Pen tool and applied the same Orthogonal Line command. Same error message.
Either InDesign is broken or I am.
OK, looks like there’s been a bug for quite a few years.
The Orthogonal Line command only works if there is no stroke applied to the lines.
A good reason to use Object Styles.
Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction!
Why wouldn’t InD just add a tool for vertical and horizontal lines (like Quark had). It’s a no-brainer. I just spent an hour re-doing a page with several horizontal lines. Would have taken me 1-2 minutes in Quark. Also, what’s with “stroke”? Not a medical emergency. Not an artist’s brush technique. A BORDER? Who would have thought it meant a border. Ridiculous.
InDesign uses the convention first created in 1987 in Illustrator to call the appearance applied to the outside path of an object the stroke.
Microsoft Word uses the word “Border”. But that is not a professional design/illustration program.
Hello! Great tutorial! I use this website all the time! I’m trying to make even, diagonal lines using InDesign. Is this possible? I’ve googled and looked everywhere, but I keep finding how to do it with either Illustrator or Photoshop. If it can be done with InDesign and you can give me any help, it would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks so much!