Guides

Introduction

Guides are horizontal or vertical lines that you can add to your canvases to help you to position items precisely. They won't appear in your finished animations, but they will be saved with your documents. Each canvas has its own set of guides.

If you imagine guides are made of metal, ducks act like magnets around guides, snapping onto them when they get close enough. This means that, using guides, it is easy to ensure ducks are in particular places.

Position ducks, vertex ducks, tangent ducks, radius ducks, width ducks and angle ducks can all snap onto guides. This means that you can use guides to accurately position anything and everything in Synfig Studio.

Appearance

Guides look like this in the canvas window:

As you can see above, they appear as blue dashed lines that extend across your working area to the edges of the canvas window. A guide that is being positioned on the canvas will appear as a red dashed line instead of a blue dashed line.

Adding guides to your canvases

There are two ways to add guides to your canvases. You can drag them from the canvas window rulers or you can add guides using the Canvas MetaData Panel.

Dragging from the canvas window rulers

You can add a horizontal guide by moving your mouse over the horizontal ruler at the top of the canvas window, holding down the left mouse button and then dragging your mouse downwards. To show you that you are positioning the guide, it will appear as a red dashed line. When you release the left mouse button the guide will be placed on your canvas and the red dashed line will become blue.

You can add a vertical guide by moving your mouse over the vertical ruler at the left of the canvas window, holding down the left mouse button and then dragging your mouse to the right. To show you that you are positioning the guide, it will appear as a red dashed line. When you release the left mouse button the guide will be placed on your canvas and the red dashed line will become blue.

Using the Canvas MetaData Panel

Advanced users may sometimes want to add guides using the Canvas MetaData Panel. The Meta Data Panel stores its data in Synfig's internal units, not in pixels, points, etc.

To show how this works, we'll open a new file in Synfig Studio and add a vertical guide to the centre of the canvas.

1. Select "File → New" or press CtrlN to open a new file.
2. Select the Meta Data Panel in the Params, Children, Keyframes, Timetrack, Curves, Canvas MetaData window.
3. Click the "Add new MetaData entry" icon (the one that looks like a +) at the bottom of the panel. A "New MetaData Entry" dialog box will appear.
4. Type "guide_x" and click "OK" or press ↵ Enter.
5. Double click on the Data column next to the "guide_x" Key in the Canvas MetaData Panel.
6. Type "0" and press ↵ Enter. A new vertical guide should appear at the centre of your canvas.

The "guide_x" Key in the Meta Data Panel stores all the vertical guides on the current canvas. It stores them as a list floating point numbers separated by spaces.

The "guide_y" key in the Meta Data Panel stores all the horizontal guides on the current canvas. It stores them as a list of floating point numbers separated by spaces.

Removing guides from your canvases

1. Dragging from the rulers
2. Using the canvas Meta Data panel

Positioning guides precisely

1. Using the info panel

Tip The Info panel is not updated when you first add guides to the canvas, but it is updated when you reposition them. We suggest that you place new guides roughly into position first, then reposition them with the help of the Info Panel to get them into exact position.

note end

1. Using the canvas Meta Data panel

Showing or hiding guides

There are two ways to position your guides precisely. You can use the Info Panel to position your guides, or you can enter a precise position in the Canvas MetaData Panel.

Snapping

1. Using info panel
2. Using the canvas Meta Data panel