You can add guides to Framer by first showing the rulers and then dragging guides from the rulers onto your canvas.
Guides are a helpful way to align elements precisely within your design or layout in Framer. These guides are visually represented lines that you can place anywhere on your design area to help you position content consistently.
Showing Rulers in Framer
The first step to adding guides is to make the rulers visible. Framer's rulers appear along the top and left edges of your design canvas.
To show the rulers:
- Navigate through the application menu: Go to Menu → View → Show Rulers.
- Use the keyboard shortcut: Press CTRL + R (on Windows, and typically CMD + R on macOS, although the reference specifically mentions CTRL + R).
Once the rulers are displayed, you are ready to add guides.
Adding Guides Manually
With the rulers visible, adding a guide is a straightforward process:
- Click and Drag: Click directly on either the horizontal ruler (at the top) or the vertical ruler (on the left).
- Pull onto Canvas: While holding the mouse button down, drag the cursor out from the ruler onto your design area.
- Place the Guide: Release the mouse button where you want the guide to appear. A horizontal or vertical line (depending on which ruler you dragged from) will be placed on your canvas.
You can add as many horizontal and vertical guides as needed by repeating this dragging process from the respective rulers.
Understanding Guide Specificity
It's important to note, as mentioned in the reference:
- Guides are page or frame specific: "The ruler guides are specific to the page or frame you're working on."
This means that the guides you add to one page or frame will not automatically appear on others. If you need the same guides on multiple pages, you will have to manually add them to each page individually after showing the rulers on that page. The reference confirms this, stating you "can manually add the same guides to each page by going to Menu → View → Show Rulers or using the shortcut CTRL + R" (implying you do this on each page).
In summary, enable rulers via the View menu or shortcut, then drag lines from the rulers onto your canvas to create guides tailored to your current page or frame.
