4.3.0 - Real artboard support

Mar 29, 2016 | Written byCameron McEfee

GuideGuide officially supports CC 2015’s artboards and artboard guides. The latest release includes a number of new features and improvements that make working with artboard guides much more simple.

When Adobe released artboards and artboard guide in 2015, I was caught off guard. The new features were not documented for extension developers, so to add support as quickly as possible, I threw together a modified version of the old guide system which tried to figure out the artboard provenance of each guide based on it’s location in the document. While this system worked ok, as you’ve probably experienced, it has a few flaws, which you’ve probably experience.

Since leaving my previous job, I’ve had the time to dig into the artboard feature, figure out how it works, and add real, not-terrible support. Here’s what you’ll find in 4.3.0:

Artboard guides

In documents with artboards, GuideGuide knows the difference between artboard guides and canvas guides, and knows to which artboard each guide belongs. This means that GuideGuide can once again check for duplicate guides and treat each artboard independently.

GuideGuide can also run actions in multiple artboards at once.

Marquee Layers palette selection based guides

GuideGuide no longer uses the current marquee selection as a reference point for actions in specific parts of documents. Instead, it uses your selected layers, layer groups, and artboards. This allows for a lot more power when adding, clearing, and duplicating guides.

Selected layers

If you have layers selected in the layers palette, GuideGuide will use their height, width, and position as the context for creating guides. This replaces the older marquee selection based feature. If you select more than one layer, GuideGuide will use the combined shape as the context. If you select a layer set, GuideGuide will use the combined shape of all visible layers within it as the context. If you would like to include non-visible layers in a layer set, select the non-visible layers in addition to the layer set.

Selected artboards

If you have not selected any layers when you use GuideGuide, it will use your document’s artboards as its context (or the document if no artboards exist). When you use GuideGuide without selecting artboards, it will run your action in all artboards in your document. If you select one or more artboards, those artboards will have the action run in them.

More clear guide options

In CC 2014+, the GuideGuide panel’s flyout menu includes shortcuts to the following built-in Photoshop features:

It also includes a couple handy features that allow you to clear only horizontal or vertical guides. All of these clearing options work with the new layer-selection feature to give you much more control over how you get rid of guides.

Duplicate guides

In CC 2014+, the GuideGuide panel’s flyout menu also includes two features that allow you to duplicate guides between your artboards and documents.

Duplicate to all artboards

When run, GuideGuide will duplicate the guides that fall within the current selection context or artboard to all artboards in your document. If no artboards are selected, it will duplicate all guides between all artboards, effectively syncing guides between them. Any guides that already exist will be ignored to avoid having multiple guides in the same location.

If your selection includes canvas guides (the kind that are relative to the document rather than an artboard), GuideGuide will add artboard guides to the artboards those guides overlap. This is a handy way to convert your canvas guides to artboard guides.

Duplicate to open documents

GuideGuide can duplicate all guides from your current document to all other open documents. It is difficult to determine your intent when doing something like this, so GuideGuide does not try to replicate artboard guides when duplicating. Instead, it combines all selected contexts in your current document and copies them as one into each document as canvas guides.

For example, if you have one artboard with a guide at 10 and another artboard with a guide at 20, when you you duplicate to open documents, the other documents will receive canvas guides at 10 and 20. Once in the new document, you can use the duplicate to artboards feature and some crafty selecting of layers to put the guides where they need to be.

Keep in mind, GuideGuide is copying the exact coordinates of your guides, not the original intent of the grid. If your documents are different sizes, your results may be unpredictable.

Fibonacci

When I put Fibonacci on the GuideGuide website as an example of a crazy grid no one would ever actually try, I had no idea how many people would contact me for help to do it themselves. I’ve replaced the default two column grid preset with a Fibonacci preset. You can get it by deleting your all of your saved grids and click the “Add default grids”, or save a new Custom grid with this grid notation:

| 1% | 1% | 1% | 2% | 3% | 5% | 8% | 13% | 21% | 34% | ( vl )

Debug logging

While I’d love to write perfect, bug-free software, I have not achieved that skill quiet yet. Sometimes bugs happen, and often their cause isn’t clear to the person experiencing them. I’ve added a debug feature to the CC 2014+ flyout menu which, when enabled, will output log info to a file that you can send to me when things don’t work as expected.

Enjoy

I hope you enjoy these new features and find the adjustment to the new layer-based selection system a smooth one. I look forward to hearing your feedback.