Centering between guides

[lefteris]

One question that might sound naive but has troubled me. How do you center text or object(s) between 2 (or more?) guides (lines). It occurs a lot in my work and I need to find a quick way to do it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

By the by, congratulations for the forum, I got a lot of knowledge and know how out of it just by browsing from time to time.

Lefteris

[Thatch]

I usually make a temp boxe that is the width of the space I want to center in. (as in the two guidelines you mentioned). I then align the the object(s) I want centered between the guides to the temp box. The whole thing will shift location but you just them move the temp box back in place between the guides with 'snap to guides' on (if you like), and then delete the temp box.

There might be a better way to do it but this seems to fit my work flow fairly well. It's quick and dirty.

Hope that helps.

J

[lefteris]

Thanks for the tip Joe. I tried it and works fine although I was looking for a built in function from Xara Pro.
Sometimes the text and graphics I use makes it harder to include the temp box in there since there is no available space.
If nothing else appears though, it is a viable option.

Lefteris

[gwpriester]

Also, if you select Joe's rectangle with the Rectangle Tool, a cross hair X appears and makes it easier to snap a guideline to the exact center of the rectangle.

When I used to work in advertising before we had the computer, I often had to find the center of something on a layout or mechanical I was working on. The math was often more than I could deal with, so I discovered using a piece of paper with a tick mark for end of the area I needed to find the center of.

Then I would merely fold the paper so the tick marks appeared and where the paper creased, was the center of the area. Math for the mathematically challenged I called it.

Gary

[lefteris]

I see your point Gary. So I suppose there is no function in XPro to do this automatically.

I still fold the paper in half to find the middle for the punch holes
Nah, rather math for the more practical minds!

[haakoo]

Or maybe try this way

-have guidelines in place
-create your object somewhere between the guidelines(remember the width of your object)
-stretch it to left guideline,snap
-stretch it to the right guideline,snap
-hold shiftkey and drag the handles to the original width
-centered

Gr,Hans

[lefteris]

Interesting perspective, thank for sharing it Hans!

[amoore]

The whole thing will shift location

A big reason why I've been begging for years for the option to align to a selected object...

You'd still have to create an object between the guides to align to, but at least you wouldn't have to jockey the thing back into place again.

To do what Lefteris is trying to do, I may create a guideline that's halfway between the two "boundary" guidelines, then visually align the object to be centered on the new guideline via the bounding boxes.

[stratocast]

I was faced with this problem some time ago, when I needed to constantly centre objects between two guidelines.

My solution was to draw a rectangle on the guides layer ('snap to objects' will align the top and bottom of the rectangle to the page edges), select object and rectangle, then align within selection bounds.

Just another way of doing it.

[lefteris]

It's really good to see all these alternative ideas for this one "problem".
I have been using it for some days now and must say that it's not so bad once you get used to it. If you can automate it somehow then it would be fantastic.