Rulers, Guides, and Power Guides

Guides give the drawing explicit reference positions. Use an ordinary guide to align and measure without changing the outline; link nodes to a guide when moving that reference should also reshape the drawing.

Rulers and Creating Guides

Choose View > Rulers, or press Cmd+Shift+R on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, to display the Glyph window rulers. Their divisions are font units, not screen pixels. The horizontal ruler reads x positions; the vertical ruler reads y positions from the baseline.

A glyph guide belongs to the current glyph. A font guide supplies a shared reference across glyphs in the font. Their usual red glyph-guide and purple font-guide colors distinguish the scopes, but colors are configurable, so also check the guide's properties. Guide appearance preferences also provide per-type opacity controls; a faint guide may still exist and remain an eligible reference. Guides can be horizontal, vertical, or angled vector guides. Element guides provide another, more local scope for content organized into elements; see The Element Model.

Drag a guide from a ruler

Drag from the horizontal ruler for a horizontal guide or from the vertical ruler for a vertical guide. Release at the desired position on the canvas.

• An ordinary ruler drag creates a glyph guide.
• Shift-drag creates a font guide.
• Option/Alt-drag adds measurement markers to the new guide.
• Combine Shift with Option/Alt for a font guide with markers.

For an italic-angle guide, hold Cmd on macOS or Ctrl on Windows while dragging from the vertical ruler. Add Shift for font scope. Set a nonzero italic angle first if the guide should lean.

Select two nodes and choose Tools > Guides > Add Guide to place a guide through their positions. This is useful for capturing an existing diagonal without estimating its angle.

Move and orient a guide

Use the Contour tool to drag a horizontal or vertical guide. The Guides tool is primarily a measuring tool and does not move those guides in the same way; hold A to use Contour temporarily if needed.

Click the small circle on a horizontal or vertical guide to give it vector controls, then drag its direction control to change the angle. Its context menu provides explicit Horizontal, Vertical, and slant-to-italic choices.

A vector guide exposes an origin, an angle, and a length rather than only one horizontal or vertical position.

Choose View > Glyph Guides and View > Font Guides independently to show the two scopes. A hidden guide has not been deleted. If a guide is visible but will not move, check its lock state and the active tool.

Guide Properties and Management

Select a guide and open Window > Panels > Guide. The panel and property bar provide its available name, position, angle, width, color, and related controls. A meaningful name such as smallcap_top makes a reference easier to identify and reuse in an expression.

A guide's width supplies a second parallel edge. Shift-drag a guide to establish the width, then adjust the second edge or enter a value. This creates a reference band; it does not thicken the glyph's outlines.

Use the lock control to protect the guide against accidental movement. Its Snap setting controls whether it can attract points, alongside the global snap category for that guide type. A visible guide with its own Snap disabled will not behave like an ordinary snap target.

Font-guide tags restrict where a guide appears. For example, a guide tagged uc is shown in glyphs matching that tag, which is useful for an uppercase-only reference. Check tag spelling and the glyph's matching tags when a font guide appears in some glyphs but not others.

For a named glyph or font guide, the Guide inspector's Copy to masters control copies its properties to existing guides with the same name in other masters. Create and name the corresponding guides first; this control does not create a missing guide. Inspect each receiving guide after copying. Copying values once does not make later guide edits a live relationship across masters.

Measure along a guide

Double-click a plain guide to add automatic measurement markers at outline intersections. As the guide moves, these markers track the intersections. Double-click again to make the markers fixed, and again to remove them.

Fixed marker positions can be adjusted individually, with proportional positions represented as percentages of guide length in the guide controls. On a vector guide, Proportional Marks determines whether their positions follow changes in the guide's length. This matters when a guide is serving as a reusable measured reference rather than a temporary ruler.

Manage font guides together

Open File > Font Info > Guides to manage the current master's font guides as a list. Use + to add, − to remove selected guides, and edit the relevant name, position, or tag field. Sort the table to find related references. A font guide's scope across glyphs does not mean its values are automatically identical in every master.

For a calculated position, enter a formula in the guide's calculator-marked Expression field. A horizontal guide can follow caps_height or another named value instead of holding a fixed y coordinate. See Expressions and Parameters for a worked setup.

This font guide is positioned by caps_height/2. Its name, color, orientation, and expression are visible in the Guide panel.

Align drawing points to guides

Select the points or contour to align, then choose Contour > Align Points > To Guides. FontLab uses eligible nearby guides; guide orientation and snap distance affect the available alignment. Inspect the result if several guides are close together. Move the reference or narrow the selection when the nearest eligible guide is not the one you intended.

Power Guides

A power guide has nodes linked to it. Moving the guide then moves those nodes. Unlinked nodes between two power guides interpolate proportionally as those references move, allowing a coordinated change to a larger part of the drawing.

Use the Attach tool (U) to drag from a node to the intended guide. Enable Node Links in the contour view controls to inspect the link indication. Links act horizontally or vertically; a node can carry at most one link in each direction, even when the guide is angled.

Make a small trial movement with the Contour tool and check the whole outline. Linked nodes follow their guide, while intermediate and neighboring points can also respond. Undo if the reference controls a larger region than intended.

To remove a link, use Attach to drag the linked node toward empty canvas. Tools > Guides > Unlink Power Guides provides broader removal. A guide can remain a power guide while other nodes are still linked to it.

Preserve a stem while changing proportions

Place a vertical guide at each edge of a stem and link the nodes on each edge to its guide. To move the stem without changing its width, move both edge guides by the same horizontal distance. Moving only one edge changes the width. For example, moving guides from x = 100 and x = 180 to x = 120 and x = 200 shifts an 80-unit stem by 20 units while preserving its width. Paired horizontal guides provide the analogous control for a horizontal stroke.

To change the glyph’s overall proportions while retaining stem widths, coordinate its bounding guides with these edge pairs. Move each pair by equal amounts when its stem should retain its thickness; change the distance between pairs to change the intervening space. Horizontal guides can establish height references in the same construction. The result is controlled reshaping, not an assurance that any movement of one guide preserves every width. Inspect the unlinked points that interpolate between the references as well as the linked stem edges.

This setup lets you alter spaces between strokes while retaining chosen stroke dimensions. It does not automatically preserve every width simply because guides have been linked.

Nodes cannot be linked directly to the font dimension lines through this workflow. Instead, position an ordinary guide with an expression such as caps_height, then link nodes to that guide. With Live Metrics enabled, spacing expressions can also recalculate after the drawing changes, so inspect spacing as well as contours.

Guide-to-zone and guide-to-hint conversion is taught in Alignment Zones and Standard Stems. Copying guide properties across masters is developed in Managing Layer Content. Hints and alignment zones can also serve as power-guide references; font dimension lines cannot be linked directly through this workflow.