When it comes to lining up design elements in a layout perfectly, I’m a real stickler. Usually this passion for perfection is satisfied by dragging on guides and snapping to them (View > Grids & Guides > Snap to Guides) or by using the Align palette (Window > Align). But sometimes it’s not the edges of objects that need to be lined up. For instance, maybe you’d like the baseline of the last line of a paragraph to be lined up perfectly with the bottom of a large Illustrator graph that’s positioned off to the side of your Text Frame. You can start by zooming close to that last line of text using the Zoom tool (z). Then drag a Ruler Guide to the last baseline in order to line up the picture. But, as you start moving the graph, an obvious question arises. How do you know what’s happening with the rest of this large graph (that you can’t see) when you’re zoomed in so tight on the text? The answer is simple. You need to look at your layout from two Views at once. Go to Window > Arrange > New Window to open this same layout in a second window with a “zoomed out” view. You can then use the “zoomed out” view to resized your graph and the “zoomed in” view to make sure the graph is lined up with the baseline of the type. This eliminates the need for a lot of zooming in and out.
Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider.
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