Smart Guides overrides Shift-to-Constrain

I love Smart Guides. I'm very glad they've been added to InDesign. I had even put in a feature request years ago. However, there is a flaw. When I am Option-dragging to drag a copy of an object, and holding Shift so that the new object is horizontally aligned to the old object, sometimes Smart Guides forces my new object a bit up or down. Seemingly over-eager to please, it is trying to align to something else; in a recent instance, being evenly distributed with some other objects.
I contend that holding Shift to constrain should override Smart Guides. I don't expect to hear a solution here (beyond temporarily disabling Smart Guides when needed), just seeing if anyone else has the same issue. I'll be putting in a feature request.

Just tried that and it makes no difference whether I hit shift before or during. Oddly enough, if I just let the Smart Guides do the work instead of shift, it will work, but adding shift makes it decide to try to evenly distribute to some other objects instead.
My personal issue with letting Smart Guides do my shift-constraining is that it's a lot more finnicky to make sure it's snapping to the right thing. It might be aligning to a nearby object; it's not always crystal clear based on the lines that are appearing. Using shift is supposed to ensure that, hey, it's just dragging along the horizontal or vertical axis, without having to be very careful or look too closely. Shift constraining is such a firmly established tool that it's throwing me for a loop that it doesn't always work like it should anymore. It should have seniority!
Not losing any sleep over it. I'm just saying.

Similar Messages

Smart guides overriding shift / cardinal directions.

Smart guides override snapping to the previous position using the shift key while dragging an object. I suppose they're only trying to help and the underlying problem is with my document composition, but smart guides seems to respect every other boundary imaginable (a lovely feature for me, and why turning them off is no solution), except the previous position of the object while holding shift (which seems to be the most important one, since I've taken time to hold shift). It ignores the previous position completely, not even adding it to one of the many stops of the alignment train...
Any workarounds (besides better design)?

I'm very sure I'm patched to 6.04 at work (home now, but very sure as it came out in Sept 09 and I'm running new 27"ers [g]).
When I shift-drag an item to hold the alignment to the original position, if a smart-guide-sensed boundary is within the snap distance to the original position, holding shift moves the object to the smart-guided-sensed alignment, and will not snap to the previous position. Turning off smart guides solves the problem. No mention of it here: http://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-cs4-6-0-4-update-now-available.php
A particularly annoying problem as it doesn't move the object much (snap distance?). Could be easy to overlook. How long this has been going on I'm not even sure. When I get some time at work, I'll try 6.00 through 6.04. I'm not sure when I noticed the problem. Maybe it's a SL / Leopard thing as I just moved from Tiger.

Smart Guides, Constrain Proportions and Resizing an Object.

When I have Smart Guides on and I'm trying to resize an object while holding shift (to constrain) Indesign seems to ignore the shift key. Usually when there's other objects in close proximity, or just closely aligned, vertically or horizontally. The image I posted is a good example. Trying to resize the bracket object while near all those other objects results in a lot of skipping around, and constrain not working. You can see in the image the outline is not constrained, even though I'm holding the shift key. It just wants to jump to those Smart Guides regardless of what I'm trying to tell it to do.
This isn't much of an issue, but basically I'm wondering if this is a bug, or if the Smart Guides, just take priority. It's bit annoying turning smart guides on and off constantly to accomodate this odd behavior. Does anyone have any insight on this?

Hi,
I'm on a Mac Snow Leopard/CS5, and there actually is an update I haven't installed yet. I'm on 7.0.3, so I'll try that out.
If it is a bug it's certainly not the end of the world, but I was curious if anyone else had been dealing with it as well. I love the Smart Guides, except for that.

Indesign cs6, smart guides on, transform not proportional

i use my smart guides a lot. i have found that when i go to transform an image using the direct select tool, and the cmd+shift function, the percentage of the scale is not consistant on teh x and y axis (they should be the same). i do have the "constrain proportions" active. i have tested without them being active. it seems, so far, the only time i can recreate the issue is when the smart guides are active.
-osx 10.8.3
-indesign cs6 (cloud subscription)
-smart guides on
-transform window open
-constrain proportions active
-direct select tool
-select image within a frame with direct select tool (white arrow tool)
-use shift+cmd and drag and scale, repeat (small and large areas)
-repeat a few times and watch the horizontal and vertical percentages in the transform window. percentages will not be consistent after a few tries
does anyone else have this issue?
can anyone else recreate this issue?
does anyone have any suggestions on a fix (other than turning off the smart guides)?
thanks in advance
-maria

okay, i finally figured this bad boy out! here is the solve in case you guys come across the problem
-indesign cs6, go to preferences>guides and pasteboard
-go to "smart guide options"
-turn OFF "smart dimensions" and "smart spacing"
all is well with the world, and i can sleep peacefully once again

[CS3 - Win] Smart Guides not showing up when Snap To Grid enabled

Has anyone else encountered this bug?
AI CS3 13.02
Smart Guides are turned on, but hovering over items does not show the cyan hints, snapping to anchor points / paths etc does not work. This only occurs when Snap To Grid is enabled. If you then go and turn it off, the Smart Guides start working again as expected.
Is this a known bug?
Tom

Thanks for the reply Mike. Smart Guides work perfectly for me provided Snap to Grid is turned off.
I can see there being a conflict between snapping to grid and smart guides in CS3 - which takes precedence? From a UX perspective, if these two snapping modes are mutually exclusive, there should be at the very least an alert letting you know the other mode is disabled; the menu item should be greyed out. Or if it's truly an either-or situation, then the menu needs to be revised such that both snap to grid and smart guides are within the same submenu, and only one can be selected at a time, toggle with CMD+SHIFT+OPT+U.
T

Smart Guide/Snap to point not working

Hi
I am trying to remove a circular shape from a rectangle in illustrator, the retangles width is 10px and the diameter of the circle is 13px, I centre the circle ontop of the rectangle ( or I appear to) but when I use the Shape mode tool minus front, the circle is no longer centred ( see images)
I have tried switching off smart guides and snap to grid and am still having the same problem.
In the above image you can see once I have divided the 13px circle from the rectangle it has moved off to one side.
Also when I am trying to manually place the circle ( rather than using the centre guides ) I can only move it by a large degree it alway moves further than I move the mouse, could this be because of a pixel grid? I do not think I am using this. ( can see in the above image where I am trying to place the circle and when I let go of the mouse, the grey circle is where it lands
From the 2 images below you can see that there is a 1px difference on either side of the extracted circle I was trying to get centred
I should mention that the 'Align to pixel grid' in the transform menu is inactive when I am trying to do this, as I initially thought that this may be the cause of my problems, but it made no difference

Rebecca,
So why does the minus front tool mess up alignment so much?
No clue. I believe this issue has never been reported.
At a first glance, it really looked like an Align to Pixel Grid issue, and also the fact that it works when both object widths have an odd (or even) number of pixels.
But that is apart from the fact that you stated that it was off. If it were on, Align to Pixel Grid would apply to the circle, to the rectangle, or to both.
Obviously, it is possible to (direct) select each and check. It is also possible to check the Y value of the centre for both in the Transform palette and see that they are actually identical before applying the Pathfinder.
And if on, Align to Pixel Grid should also affect/destroy the Object>Path>Divide Objects Below way. And it should make it impossible to even place both objects centre aligned when one is an odd number of pixels wide and the other is an even number wide.
As the issue is described, it may indicate some Pathfinder>Minus Front malfunctioning.
It may be worth trying some of the following things (you may have tried/done some of them already) and see whether it helps (the following is a general list of things you may try when it is not in a specific file; 3) and 4) are specifically aimed at possibly corrupt preferences):
1) Close down Illy and open again;
2) Restart the computer;
3) Close down Illy and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Cmd+Option+Shift during startup (easy but irreversible);
4) Move the folder with Illy closed (more tedious but also more thorough and reversible);
5) Look through and try out the relevant among the Other options (Item 7) is a list of usual suspects among other applications that may disturb and confuse Illy, other items may also be relevant);
Even more seriously, you may:
6) Uninstall, run the Cleaner Tool if you have CS3/CS4/CS5/CS6, and reinstall.
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cscleanertool.html

Illustrator CC Free Transform not Snapping to Guides, No Smart Guides

The Free Transform tool in Illustrator CC won't snap to Guides, and Smart Guides don't seem to work either.
I have all the options checked in Preferences > Smart Guides > Display Options and the Snapping Tolerance turned way up.
In CS6, Free Transform with Smart Guides allowed you to snap to paths, points, alignments and guides.
Also: Any way to hide/minimize the Free Transform popup?

James,
Depending on the urgency of your plight, you may await some cleverer suggestions, or read on.
When seems to be wrong for no apparent reason, and it is not limited to certain (existing) documents, you may consider the following (you may have tried/done some of them already) and see whether it helps, unless someone comes up with a cleverer suggestion.
The following is a general list of things you may try when the issue is not in a specific file; 3) and 4) are specifically aimed at possibly corrupt preferences:
1) Close down Illy and open again;
2) Restart the computer (you may do that up to 3 times);
3) Close down Illy and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Cmd+Option+Shift during startup (easy but irreversible);
4) Move the folder Other options (follow the link with that name) with Illy closed (more tedious but also more thorough and reversible);
5) Look through and try out the relevant among the Other options (follow the link with that name, Item 7) is a list of usual suspects among other applications that may disturb and confuse Illy, Item 15) applies to CC, CS6, and maybe CS5);
Even more seriously, you may:
6) Uninstall, run the Cleaner Tool, and reinstall.
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cscleanertool.html

Smart guides labels appears but sometimes NOT.

When I am using smart guides in illustrator cs6 it is problem which makes me nervous.
When I select point, handles appear. When I move next to handle top the label appear. But SOMETIMES NOT appear, SOMETIMES APPEAR. It is terrible.
- It might be nice when labels ALWAYS APPEAR, WHEN I AM NEXT TO HANDLE TOP or NEXT TO THE ANCHOR POINT.
Because then I know, that when label appear, I can work with that concrete handle, or point.
I know, that it depends of the snapping tolerance, which I can set in Preferences. But when the snapping tolerance is too high, it is unpleasant to draw anything. When snapping tollerance is high i can draw objects on A4 leter which is usual, but my lines and handles are attached anytime when I do not want.
When I do not use smart guides it is unpleasant to draw lines too. Sometimes I grab handle when I want, but sometimes I fail.
I think it may be a good solution if you fix it so that the snapping tollerance will be lower, but labels will appear sooner and reliably.
I like Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. But this is the reason, why Illustrator makes me crazy, when I work there. Thanks

David,
I do not have align to pixel grid or snap to grid turned on
It sounds as if Illy thinks the former.
The following is a general list of things you may try when the issue is not in a specific file (you may have tried/done some of them already); 1) and 2) are the easy ones for temporary strangenesses, and 3) and 4) are specifically aimed at possibly corrupt preferences); 5) is a list in itself, and 6) is the last resort.
1) Close down Illy and open again;
2) Restart the computer (you may do that up to 3 times);
3) Close down Illy and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Cmd+Option+Shift during startup (easy but irreversible);
4) Move the folder (follow the link with that name) with Illy closed (more tedious but also more thorough and reversible);
5) Look through and try out the relevant among the Other options (follow the link with that name, Item 7) is a list of usual suspects among other applications that may disturb and confuse Illy, Item 15) applies to CC, CS6, and maybe CS5);
Even more seriously, you may:
6) Uninstall, run the Cleaner Tool (if you have CS3/CS4/CS5/CS6/CC), and reinstall.
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cscleanertool.html

Turning off smart guides breaks pen line

Has anybody noticed that if you switch smart guides on or off (with Cmd+U) while you are drawing with the pen tool it breaks the path. You have to go back and draw from the last anchor point. Sometimes smart guides help, sometimes they're a pain, depending on what part of a path you are drawing, so it's useful to be able to turn them on or off while you are drawing. Is there a workaround? (CS3).

Thanks Kurt and Mon. This works fine.
However, there's another thing I noticed while I was playing around with smart guide prefs:
It seems there is no way to disable Angles, not even if you try to delete all figures from the 6 boxes. At least, I can't get Custom Angles to work that way. Smart guides always seem to revert to 90° & 45° Angles. When drawing with the pen it's often useful to see where other anchor points and paths are, but constrained angles are a pain.

Legacy Smart Guides in CS5?

Wondering if there is any talk of being able to opt for "legacy" Smart Guides in Illustrator CS5? I would upgrade for that feature alone. The Smart Guides in CS4 are infuriating. I know this is an old gripe. And, yes, I'm aware of tweaking preferences and holding down command key. It's still not the same...and not even satisfactory. I would love a simple one-click option in prefs that would allow for the user to abandon the new smart guides in favor of the good ol' pre-CS4 smart guides.
Anyone know?

I hesitated to try to explain the old behavior of the guides, but I wasn't confident that I could convey the idea without making it more confusing to those who don't know what we are talking about. But, you pretty much nailed it. It is infuriating when I am dragging an object and hovering over a point on another object, expecting to be able to constrain my angles of movement from that point (as in CS3), and it just doesn't work. And to make things even worse, sometimes the point that I want to align with seems to be the only point on the entire artboard that I CAN'T align with. It feels like a deliberate prank. "Smart" guide lines are lighting up all over the place like "Do you want to line up with this point? How 'bout now? No? This one? That one? Here? Here? Here? Here? Here? Here? Here?" NO GODDAMMIT! I want to line up with the point that I am hovering over....not every single other shape on the board.
That is the behavior that I was alluding to when I described this Adobe "improvement" to be Microsoft-Office-like. I don't know if any of you have had the misfortune of having to use Microsoft Word over the years, but if you have, then you know what I am talking about. You type in the word "Dear" and the program assumes that you are trying to type a letter and starts making all sorts of suggestions and formatting changes and pulling up names from your contacts. Or you type a bullet point and all of the sudden your margins and font point size and indentations and everything else changes because the "smart" program makes assumptions about what you are trying to do. 99.9% of the time the software is wrong and you spend 10 minutes undoing everything the program just did to "help" you. It used to not be that way.
I have grown to expect that sort of behavior from Microsoft and their bloatware. Now I fear that we will be seeing more and more of this from Adobe in the future. I think at some point certain software titles reach a point of maturity where the product works so well that the engineers and programmers resort to needless tinkering in order to justify their existence and put out a new and "improved" version when corporate says so. Bummer.
It would be one thing if it were a give-and-take scenario. If I found some of the new smart guide behaviors to be an improvement I would possibly accept the absense of the old behaoviors. But that is not the case. There is not one single new aspect to the smart guides that I find to be an improvement. That feature is now completely blown for me in Illustrator....and probably will be forever. It may seem like a tiny gripe to some people...but when you consider that I probably logged in over 2,000 hours on CS3 and grew to rely heavily on the behavior of its smart guides, these later versions of Illustrator have been like learning a whole new program in some ways.
If only I could convince all of my clients to upgrade from CS4/5 to CS3...

Smart Guides.

Our school purchased the CS5 Web Design Suite at the educational price. I'm running a MacBook Pro w/ 10.6.8.
I'm doing a tutorial on the Illustrator, and I cannot get the smart guides to work. I've activated them through the "View" drop down menu, and I set up what I wanted in the "Preferences" under "Smart Guides."
Nothing happens with the smart guides.
Perhaps related: when I go to set a guide I hold the shift key so that the guides will snap to each tick mark on the ruler. But nothing happens.
Thank you for your help, and smiles to all.

@Risa: Yes to both.
@Monika: Great questions. When I set a guide I want the edge of the secret blue box surrounding the object I'm moving to attach to that guide so that I can be precise; instead, the object that I am dragging just goes past the guide I set as if it was not there.
Here are my settings.
@Jet: I have those settings, see above.
Thank you all for the responses and questions.
Big smiles to you.

Smart guides headache,

Below is a link to a tutorial I found on perspective in ai cs5. After downpoading the ai file,
I looked at it in outline view Ctrl+y.I zoomed into the drawing and saw all the object alignment flaws, a great example
of how cs4/cs5 faulty smart guides have added countless hours of frustrating extra work.
My compliments to Anil Ahuja for the fine work, it must have driven you mad all that faulty snapping.
PLEASE FIX THE SMART GUIDES ISSUES ADOBE
http://blogs.adobe.com/infiniteresolution/

I'm very sure I'm patched to 6.04 at work (home now, but very sure as it came out in Sept 09 and I'm running new 27"ers [g]).
When I shift-drag an item to hold the alignment to the original position, if a smart-guide-sensed boundary is within the snap distance to the original position, holding shift moves the object to the smart-guided-sensed alignment, and will not snap to the previous position. Turning off smart guides solves the problem. No mention of it here: http://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-cs4-6-0-4-update-now-available.php
A particularly annoying problem as it doesn't move the object much (snap distance?). Could be easy to overlook. How long this has been going on I'm not even sure. When I get some time at work, I'll try 6.00 through 6.04. I'm not sure when I noticed the problem. Maybe it's a SL / Leopard thing as I just moved from Tiger.

Smart Guides Not Showing

Hi,
Smart Guides are not showing when I use Adobe Illustrator CC.
There were several posts in this forum that suggest turning of "snap to grid" and double checking the preferences that smart guides are on. I've done both and provided screenshots.
Smart Guides is very important feature to me. I need it urgently back on.
Thanks

amarzum,
It could be a preference corruption.
You may try to:
1) Close down Illy and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Cmd+Option+Shift during startup (easy but irreversible);
or:
2) Move the folder Other options (follow the link with that name) with Illy closed (more tedious but also more thorough and reversible).

Refine smart guides....

As it is now smart guides becomes problematic when you have lots of lines and points in your illustration. It becomes what I call 'snap to crap'. It some point there are so many points that you can no longer sanp to the point you want.
It would be good to have a key command that one could use to select a particular point/line/grid and have it ignore everything else.
-C

I'm very sure I'm patched to 6.04 at work (home now, but very sure as it came out in Sept 09 and I'm running new 27"ers [g]).
When I shift-drag an item to hold the alignment to the original position, if a smart-guide-sensed boundary is within the snap distance to the original position, holding shift moves the object to the smart-guided-sensed alignment, and will not snap to the previous position. Turning off smart guides solves the problem. No mention of it here: http://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-cs4-6-0-4-update-now-available.php
A particularly annoying problem as it doesn't move the object much (snap distance?). Could be easy to overlook. How long this has been going on I'm not even sure. When I get some time at work, I'll try 6.00 through 6.04. I'm not sure when I noticed the problem. Maybe it's a SL / Leopard thing as I just moved from Tiger.

Weird smart guides snapping behavior

i've been using cs4 for a little while and i've been noticing some annoying things about smart guides. when i start illustrator everything works fine, the smart guides snap to edges correctly, but as i continue to work with illustrator the smart guides snapping function gets less reliable. my snapping tolerance is 3pt which shouldnt be the problem. as you can see in the attached image, the distance between the edges of the two rectangles is less than 3pts (i'm zoomed in). does this happen to you guys?
thanks for your help!
sergie
Message was edited by: thesergie

oh shoot, i just answered my own question. i was trying to figure out what the heck was going on and i started holding down different modifiers to see what happens (shift, control, alt) and i found something new! wow! i'm so excited!! holding down control when using smart guides gives snapping preference to the edge you are holding with the mouse! i think this should be default, but in any case its good to know it aint broke!
thanks anyways!
sergie

Smart Guides overrides Shift-to-Constrain

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