MX

Table Of Contents
Snapping
Snapping makes it easier to position edges, or specific points on objects, exactly where required. It can
be used to align edges to a specific point or line, or to evenly space objects, using the grid.
Web Designer MX Premium offers three types of snapping.
Snap to grid
Magnetic snapping (snap to objects)
Snap to guidelines or guide objects
Grid snap is useful for making objects evenly spaced, or making the sizes exact multiples of a given value.
Guidelines are useful for aligning edges (although it's a lot more powerful using guide objects) and lastly
magnetic snap is a general purpose way of accurately positioning lines, points or object edges relative to
other objects or to the page center or edges.
Snap to grid
When Snap to Grid is selected, grid points act like magnets. Right click on the pasteboard and choose
"Snap to" > "Snap to Grid" or use the menu option "Window" > "Snap to grid", (or press "."
(decimal point) on the numeric keypad). You can control the grid spacing from the options dialog (right
click and choose Page Options or use the menu command "Utilities" > "Options
") on the Grid and Ruler tab. By default web document templates have snap to grid on, with a single pixel
grid, so that normally all object dimensions and positions are whole pixels.
When dragging objects the edges will snap to grid points. If the size of the object is such that opposing
edges can't both be snapped, the edge that snaps depends on the direction the object is dragged in.
This shows a coarse grid with 5 subdivisions between major divisions. The shape has a very thick gray
outline. Because the object has been dragged down and to the left, the lower and left outside edges are
snapped to the nearest grid point.
Note:
The default grid spacing is 50 pixel spacing for major grid lines with 50 subdivisions. This means the grid
is spaced at exactly one screen pixel and so may appear not to be working at a normal 100% zoom. If
you zoom in to say 500% then you can see it does snap correctly.
Alternatively, change the grid values to have, say, 10 subdivisions which means that the grid points are on
5 pixel boundaries.
Snapping and line widths
The Scale line widths control on the Selector
Tool
InfoBar affects whether snapping happens to the
bounds of objects including their outlines.
The above example shows a shape with a very thick gray outline. It also shows (thin black line) the
outline of the shape itself (you can see the thick outline is drawn equally on either side of the center line so
Page 377