Guides (or Ruler Guides) are lines that can be placed on the document, useful for lining up and snapping elements. Guides can be a little non-discoverable in inkscape, so this article gives you a few quick tips to get the most out of guides in inkscape.
1. Quickly creating a guide
A guide can be quickly created by clicking on either the vertical or horizontal ruler, and dragging onto the canvas. If you drag from close to where the corners meet, an angled guide will be created:
2. Converting a path to Guides
Any object or path can be converted to guides Using Objects > Objects to guides (or keyboard shortcut Shift + G)
3. Deleting a guide
To Delete a guide, hover the mouse cursor over the guide, and press the Delete key on the keyboard.
4. Rotating a guide
To rotate a guide, hover over it with the mouse, and press the Shift Key. The cursor will change to a rotate cursor. Click and drag the guide to rotate it. Additionally, you can hold down the Control Key to restrict the rotate to 15 degree chunks.
5. Changing the colour of a guide
**Update** — thanks to twitter user @daishi424 for pointing out that the guide colour change is only in inkscape 0.91 (as yet unreleased) and newer versions of inkscape
To change the colour of a guide, double click the guide to bring up the Guideline dialog. Click the colour switcher button under the Label field to change the colour of the guide
6. Labeling Guides
**Update** — thanks to twitter user @daishi424 for pointing out that the guide labeling is only in inkscape 0.91 (as yet unreleased) and newer versions of inkscape
The Guidelines dialog (shown when you double click a guide) also allows you to set labels to your guides. These Labels are shown on the guide at the Guide Origin (the small circle that is on every guide)
inkscape tutorials blog 
Reblogged this on Tariqdesign .
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With what software was this animated .gif made with?
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Any way to move only the labels, i.e. without changing the guide position?
Also… you can remove your **Update… 😉 Inkscape 0.91 is the current download.
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The label is always close to the zero point of the guide, so it will always be above/below or right/left of the guide, but you can slide it along the guide by selecting a new (X,Y) coordinate for the guide origin.
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None of that seems to work under Linux. Hovering above a rule does not change the cursor, and one cannot delete or rotate guides. Also creating and moving a guide does not work well. The guide only moves a little bit.
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Delete all guides? There’s now a way to do this but I can’t find it…
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Edit | Delete All Guides in 1.2
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How do I precisely position a guide, preferably by typing in the dimension that I want the guide at, in whatever are the default measurement units (e.g. pixels or mm)? How do I see the exact position on the guide?
Thanks – Rowan
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I was wondering this too since it’s how I got to this apparently forgotten page. Turns out you can double-click on Guides to get the dialog to pop up where you can change the position to specific measurements. Found it on another site for the same search.
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Sorry, I meant double-click on *the* guides.
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I read all of these comments. I know it sounds trite, but all of these issues are addressed in the manual. Sometimes you have to ferret things out, but 99% of the time they are there. I have learned so many techniques that I’ve used to create awesome designs just from reading the Inkscape tutorials and manual that come with the program.
The key is “patience.” 🙂 Happy designing.
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Good day, guides are very useful to keep things in order in the document, though, I wonder if there is a way to tell the program or the printer to print the guides on the paper?? Thanks
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in Inkscape 0.91 on Linux Mint (xfce).
I can create guides only from the ruler, but then it’s imposible to move, rotate or delete them…
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Why did’t have a inkskape extention for this?
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