Horizontal and Vertical Guide line

[Judith Tramayne]

I would like a guide line where a dialog box pops up and I could put in a percent or a px amount. In particular, the halfway point in my painting. I would like this guide to lock so when I use the crop tool, I could have one half the image.

Now you might be asking why I would want this. When doing a fixed-layout-ebook for the iPad with my illustrations painted in ArtRage, I need to have half of my illustration be on one xhtml page and the other half to be on another .xhtml page.

It's a bit of a pain to make my painting into a .psd file, pull it into Photoshop to apply the guide and use the crop tool.

[Someonesane]

Here's a quick workaround, that doesn't require the use of another program:

1 - Let's assume you want to split the page in half vertically. Using the Ink Pen tool (set to 1% size), draw a line horizontally, from the left edge to the right edge. It's important that the line is perfectly straight, and fully reaches the borders of the page on both sides, in order to work. To ensure this, start and end the line off the edges of the canvas, and use the Ctrl+Shift+Left Click drag method to make it a perfectly straight line along the horizontal. It doesn't really matter where the line is made, but the closer to center, the better.

2 - Once you've created the line, use the Transform Tool to select and rotate the line, so that it's perfectly Vertical (Hold the Shift key while rotating, to lock the line to precise degree angles).

Since we make sure the line is drawn from edge, to edge, when we go to rotate it, ArtRage puts its axis at the dead center of the page. Because of this, we can be assured that the 1% pixel line will also be dead center on the page, when turned upright.

[Someonesane]

I made a video last night, to go with my explanation above, but my internet connection failed on me. So here it is now, if anyone's interested: Video Link

[Judith Tramayne]

Fantastic Someonesane. Works for me :-)