Delete Guide Illustrator

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Marguerite Gilbeau

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Aug 4, 2024, 6:01:52 PM8/4/24

to octennutur

Ihave a document that has some guides that can not be cleared, edited, hidden, or affected in any way. Even with all layers turned off the guides are still there. The guides are partly outside the canvas bounds.

The only thing that can make the guides change in any way is with show/hide guides. I can hide them but that's all. I need to delete them. In the image you can see that some of the guides are half on the canvas and some are off the canvas. Help.

I found out that the guides I am seeing are from symbols in my symbol pallet. Some of the common symbols I use (built by me) have guides in the symbol. Illustrator has taken all of the guides from all of my symbols and stacked them up in the upper left corner of the canvas. Even though none of the symbols are used in the document the guides still appear in the upper left. The only way to remove them is to edit or delete the symbol. I've used these same symbols for years and I've never see

I just want to add that I came here after I failed to get rid of the guides by moving them in the empty space between the artboards in v1.7.

I've read here that it should have worked, so I gave it another shot by moving the guides beyond the last artboard, and only then it worked.

Yes, or drag it back to the ruler from whence it came (which is how I've always removed guides in other apps). Given that this doesn't work, dragging it off the canvas always leaves me wondering if it's really gone, or if it's just hiding out of sight.

For me, that does work, except that I have to drag it back onto the ruler quickly to avoid the document window auto-scrolling as the pointer nears the ruler. Auto-scrolling is a useful feature when doing things like dragging an object from one artboard to another, but it makes dragging a guide back into the ruler to delete it much more difficult & uncertain that it should be.

Since the only way to select a guide is by dragging it & it won't stay selected when the pointer is released, maybe while dragging it, tapping the delete key would be an acceptable solution. Alternately, maybe adding "Delete guide" to the right-click popup menu when the pointer is over a guide would be?

There is no need to drag a guide back home to its ruler (as it works in ID for instance).

In Affinity the guide becomes deleted as soon its placed outside the page, even within bleed there are no guides.

You easily can check, edit, create and delete all guides in the Guide Manager panel.

If you place a guide outside the page with Guide Manager panel opened you can see it disappear form the list.

There is no need to drag a guide back home to its ruler (as it works in ID for instance).

In Affinity the guide becomes deleted as soon its placed outside the page, even within bleed there are no guides.

That works fine unless there are multiple artboards in the document. Then it can get complicated. For one thing, if you drag a guide over another artboard, it can end up being invisible because it is outside the selected artboard, & the only way to delete it is from the Guides Manager. For example:

Here, Artboard2 (on the right) has a vertical guide that was dropped over Artboard1 (on the left). I did that on purpose to demonstrate what I mean, but it is easy enough to do accidentally, particularly if there are several closely spaced artboards in the document.

There is no need to drag a guide back home to its ruler (as it works in ID for instance).

In Affinity the guide becomes deleted as soon its placed outside the page, even within bleed there are no guides.

This was mentioned earlier, in response to the original question. At this stage we're discussing how the task of deleting guides could be improved. If you happen to be zoomed up on a page, I think you ought to be able to drag a guide back to the ruler to remove it. That just makes intuitive sense to me.

OK, nothing strange about it -- I should have been clearer that it won't work if you are zoomed in unless you let it auto-scroll so that when you release the mouse button the pointer is not over any part of the document. If it is, it just drops the guide there.

Oh, indeed. Sorry, I had tried in Publisher only before. Yes, in Designer there can be guides outside an artboard IF they are on another artboard. AND they are not visible for either of the artboards. BUT, weird: those invisible guides do work for the artboard from where you placed it.

So, in your example: if you move an object vertically off the artboard you will see it snap at -2181px, and even get the guide visible when snapping. But only at this moment. If you release the mouse (end the object move) then the guide is invisible again.

Ah okay. That's what I meant when I asked 'are you sure the ruler isn't off the edge of the canvas?' In that case, what you're seeing is just the standard behaviour, where a guide is removed by dragging off the canvas.

I agree I don't really see the current methods as simple. In other programs I can double click and get the option to delete the guide or I can just drag the guide away from the visible area of the screen, regardless of zoom, and viola it's gone.

I kept on dragging the guide to the ruler to remove, which like others have said is very common way to remove them in other programs. When I zoomed out, I then saw a collected mess of guide lines that just didn't want to go away. It's such a pain the way it is designed. I'm surprised Affinity has not changed this given that this thread dates back a few years and it clearly hasn't changed.

...First thing I used to do when I'm designing a logo for example (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is to create a big artboard and then draw multiple ideas along it. Now imagine, every time I need to delete a guide, I must zoom out, and drag the guide outside the artboard. ...or, find it in guides manager window. How stupid is this?!

Yes, guides in InDesign used to be attached to the layer that was active while that guide was created. So you were (or still are) able to create a dedicated "guides layer" (which I actually often did back in the day...)

I always wish there was some feedback associated with this action; an 'x' is displayed beside the cursor while dragging the guide off the canvas/artboard, or a 'puff of smoke' when you release a guide outside of the canvas/artboard to indicate that it has removed.

As it is when you drag a guide outside an artboard/canvas the guide is still visible until you release the mouse button at which point it disappears. I used to think that I had inadvertently 'dropped' the guide into a nether-space where it would forever continue to exist, but would never be accessible again. It always felt like I had done something wrong.

Pretty self explanatory. It's very useful for example if you need a marquee or an odd shape to serve you as a guide and most importantly, the snapping in InDesign between a line and a guide is so different and so hard to snap to a path.

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I've been having an occasional issue with the splines/random primitives/placing and shaping guides workflow for creating Xgen hair. I can create the splines on a mesh, edit them, and save the scene. I can also reopen the scene and continue to add and edit splines. However, sometimes when I open the scene I get the error mentioned in the subject of this post. The splines are visible in the outliner tree, but I can no longer see them in the scene. Can anyone advise me on how to "re-associate" the guides?

XGen is dependent on history and that's unlikely to change. Guides that are no longer associated with a mesh (they require the face ID's and intrinsic face UV's) after deleting history are lost unless you can undo back to before the history deletion.

The simplest option is to export the collection to file before the history is deleted. Then, if you need to rebuild the guides after history is deleted, you can delete the current collection and import the XGen file, which will rebuild the guides. Material bindings are not saved in the XGen file so you'll have to reattach any materials to the descriptions but that should be all you need to do to get working guides back after deleting ALL history.