Macromedia studio 8-exploring studio 8 User Manual

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Studio Basics

Using the grid, guides, and rulers

Flash can display rulers and guides that help you draw and lay out objects 
precisely. You can place guides in a document and snap objects to those 
guides, or turn on the grid and snap objects to it.

Using rulers

When rulers are displayed, they appear along the top and left sides of the 
document. You can change the unit of measure used in the rulers from the 
default of pixels to some other unit. When you move an element on the 
Stage with the rulers displayed, lines indicating the element’s dimensions 
appear on the rulers.

To display or hide rulers:

■

Select View > Rulers.

To specify the rulers’ unit of measure for a document: 

■

Select Modify > Document, and then select a unit from the Ruler Units 
menu at the lower-left side of the dialog box.

Using guides

You can drag horizontal and vertical guides from the rulers onto the Stage 
when the rulers are displayed. You can move guides, lock guides, hide 
guides, and remove guides. You can also snap objects to guides, and change 
the guide color and snap tolerance (how close objects must be to snap to a 
guide). Flash allows you to create nested Timelines. Draggable guides 
appear on Stage only when the Timeline in which they were created is 
active. 

You can clear all the guides in the current editing mode—document-
editing mode or symbol-editing mode. If you clear guides in document-
editing mode, all the guides in the document are cleared. If you clear 
guides in symbol-editing mode, all the guides in all symbols are cleared. 

To create custom guides or irregular guides, you use guide layers. For more 
information, see 

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You can also snap objects to other objects or to pixels, or align objects 
using specified snap tolerance boundaries. For more information, see 
“Snapping” in Using Flash.

000_ExploringStudio.book  Page 78  Tuesday, August 30, 2005  9:30 AM