: Smart guides "construction guides" feature intermittent in Illustrator CS5 My sad story In the much maligned post-CS3 smart guides, there are some known problems. This Adobe forums thread is a

@Lee3735518

You're not going to believe how stupid the solution for me was. My Smart Guides would work on a fresh file, but if I had done work in the file it would just not show up. I'm talking about the construction guides while using the pen tool. Other guides worked sometimes, but pen tool guides were almost never showing up. I unchecked all the snaps and modified the preferences in every way that's been suggested all over the internet.

Then.... for some reason I right clicked and looked over the options. At the bottom of the menu is the Select > submenu and I clicked on First Object Above. The highlighting of my last point changed and bit, and my construction guides showed up. Damn problem is I have to do that at least half the time because they don't show again but it always makes them reappear again. It's the only path on that layer, so technically there is nothing above, but whatever it does, it makes it work.

Very strange. Now I'm trying to figure out if there is something I can do to keep my new anchor points so it will work. All I'm doing is clicking. All straight lines, not even using the bezier curves.

I'm curious if this works for everyone and if someone can figure out why.

Andrew

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@Candy945

I had been struggling with the loss of Smart Guides on specific documents from time to time as well.

Turning off Snap To Grid resolved this for me. Apparently, according to Adobe logic, you can't have both at the same time.

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@Alves566

I don't really know if this is want you wanted, but i've noticed that construction guides only show up when you start creating a line from an "snap point".

E.g. Try dragging with the line tool from an empty area: you get no angle guides. But if you start creating the line from an anchor point, you should get snapping to the angles defined on the Preferences panel

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@Murray976

Turn off Pixel Preview. This restored SOME but not ALL of the Smart Guide functionality.

HOWEVER:

I had full Smart Guide functionality in Pixel Preview previously. Not anymore - regardless of the following:


The first time I turned off Pixel Preview it didn't fix the problem of missing Smart Guide functionality.
If this happens... do a restart of Illustrator. Yes... this helped!
Now don't turn on Pixel Preview... more (but still not all) Smart Guide functionality comes back.


Adobe's probably got some explanation for this, as a feature.

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@Nimeshi706

A very sad answer...

Display is intermittent in CS6 and CC as well. Even the 90° smart guides can fail to appear at times. Some sort of video or redraw bug..... which seem to be fairly common in AI lately.

Adobe did something to smart guides in CS4. They won't say what, but ever since CS4 smart guides have been much less "smart" than they used to be. I think it may have something to do with the multiple artboards in CS4+ and the artboard guides which were introduced in CS4.

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