Guidelines are an important tool for laying out documents.
Guidelines are only displayed on the screen – they are not
printed. Think of the guidelines as faint pencil lines that serve as a
reference edge if you want to paste in
a new frame, but unlike
pencil lines you do not have to erase guidelines. Furthermore, the
guidelines may be made magnetic
(in the Frame editor parameters
function group of the Frame editing module). Frames that lie near a
magnetic guideline always snap (get pulled) exactly onto the
guideline. This gives you the reference edge function described above.
The guidelines described here are additional to those marking the page
margins if Create help lines
is active in the Borders
part of the Create new document dialog, but the functions of the
Guidelines module can be applied to them as well.
Besides the guidelines there are also grid lines, acting somewhat like squared paper with an adjustable square size. This grid too can be made magnetic in the Frame editor parameters function group.
However this does not exhaust the guideline functions of Calamus. You can define a border region around every frame. The width of this border may be chosen freely. Calamus uses that width for the spacing of a second frame made up of guidelines generated both inside and outside the frame. This simplifies aligning one frame with others.
The whole thing is rounded off with a function for automatically creating (normal) guidelines for multi-column layouts.
Thus there are three types of graphical help elements: Guidelines,
grid lines and guide frames. All three may be switched on and off
individually, both for display and effect. In addition you can set
whether each individual type should act magnetic
in horizontal,
vertical or both directions.
One should at least mention a fourth type of guideline: When a
printer driver has been loaded (File menu, Print
menu entry),
the printable area of a page will be marked with a broken line. Some
printers, including nearly all laser printers, cannot print a DIN-A4
page right up to the edges. These automatically created guidelines
serve as a guide to show you areas where you should preferably not
place any frames.
All guidelines are basically saved on the master page (see Page module). If you define a guideline on a document page, it will be stored on the associated master page and thus will appear on all other pages that use this master page as well.
All the guidelines are always drawn 1 pixel wide, irrespective of the set screen magnification.
The Guideline module is made up of three function groups: