Guides in different colors?

I am currently designing a couple of catalogues and flyers for a client.

And once again I find myself struggling with the guides, because they become hard to identify, once you have a couple of them.

In a typical case I will have:
Guides on every side of the whole document
Guides marking the actual printsize, sans the bleed
Guides marking the "safety zone", important in multipage catalogues
Guides marking the edges of the actual content
Guides for positioning of layout elements
Even more guides, depending on actual content

It would be really helpful if I could assign different colors to the guides, depending on their role.
Not sure if I explained it well, check the screenshot of a current document:
Attachment 117007

+1 This would be very useful.

I am going to move this to Dear Xara since it is a feature request.

I tried two things but neither works: Creating a Guides II layer. And applying dashed lines to the guides.

+1 to this. Multiple Guides layers (each with their own color) would be very helpful for page layout.

-- Ben

+1

+1

There's a work around. Just use the layers palette and use any colour of line that you want and then lock the layer or layers. That's what I do if I want a document grid to make positioning frames for pictures and text easy.

Now, by my not using XDP for any "DTP" type of work--I do create several ads and a few two-sided brochures a year--I fail to see the point of development time for this. Heck, I would gouge my eyes out using a layout application that contains that many guides as indicated in the first post. I would go for perhaps safety guides in a second color, but nothing else.

If I wanted a bazillion guides on the page, Albacore's work-around is what I would do.

Mike

That seems a reasonable solution, although requiring a bit more work/effort.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Albacore

There's a work around. Just use the layers palette and use any colour of line that you want and then lock the layer or layers. That's what I do if I want a document grid to make positioning frames for pictures and text easy.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Albacore

There's a work around. Just use the layers palette and use any colour of line that you want and then lock the layer or layers. That's what I do if I want a document grid to make positioning frames for pictures and text easy.

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Thats more like a crutch, not so much a workaround.
I need to be able to hide and show the guides by pressing 1 on numpad. No time to click around in the layers palette to hide them.
Also I need objects to snap to them.

I could use this technique for indicating the bleed, but not for anything else.

There are already bleed guides.

Here's a suggestion and this could be made into a template as well.

Make Layer 1 your guideline layer and set Layer Properties as Background, Non Printing. Lock this layer.

Create a new layer or layers and add your content to those layers.

Snap to Objects will snap text and graphics to the guides.

There're too many variables here to have a practical solution here. In my experience depending what printhouse that you use will depend what bleed settings are required. Cut lines (trim marks) will depend on how good the guillotine operator is and I could go on here. As Mike has stated you can set up your bleed size to suit your print house through your "Page Options" without much of a hassle. If all or many members wanted this option I would go along with it but as Gary has shown there're work arounds. To me it's a bit unnecessary.

+1