Tips for using guides in Indesign

Today, I’ve watched the latest excellent videocast episode no5 from indesignsecrets.com. Again our friends, Anne-Marie Concepcion and David Blatner offer a bunch of great tips using guides inside Adobe Indesign. In one part of the videocast, David share with us the keyboard shortcut to select all guides in a spread. [Cmd+Option+G (Mac) or Control+Alt+G (Win)]. He than told us he likes to have all his guides in a separated layer. We saw him moving each of them from the layer panel after having selected them with the previous mentioned keyboard. But this involve doing this steps for every pages, and moving guides from every layers to a newly created layer. Really time consuming if you have more than a few pages! Than I realized, I have used a script for many years now that eliminate all of theses extras steps, and do this in one click. I’m share it with you. The script automaticly move all guides from an entire document to a new layer call «Guides». Here what the script look like:

The script is done in applescript so it will works only on Macintosh. I promise when I find the time to learn Javascript I will post a cross-platform version. You can download the script here. I’m also making another one available that will delete all guides from all spreads. Usefull since the Delete All Guides command in Indesign only works on one page. Download this one here. If you want to know how and where to install the scripts you can read How to install scripts in InDesign by Anne-Marie.

Also, if you don’t want to miss any new episode of Indesign Secrets Videocast, you can subscribe here on iTunes.