Comments on: Straighten Me Out

By: Redd Vinylene

Redd Vinylene — Wed, 06 May 2009 08:13:45 +0000

Haha

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:42:22 +0000

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!

By: Lee

Lee — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:48:27 +0000

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).

By: Harbs

Harbs — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:09:17 +0000

@Adi: Kudos to you! Very, very tricky!

I should have thought of that…

By: Adi Ravid

Adi Ravid — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:35:00 +0000

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.

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:00:44 +0000

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!

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:19:39 +0000

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!

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:47:12 +0000

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!

By: Mike Rankin

Mike Rankin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:38:49 +0000

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.

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:30:29 +0000

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.