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Automatic Guidelines

LightBurn features two types of automatic guidelines to help you align objects relative to one another, or along vertical or horizontal planes.

  • Alignment Guides are temporary visual guides that indicate when an object's edge or center is aligned to an edge or center of another object in your Workspace.

  • Draggable Guidelines are persistent lines set to the T1 Tool layer — they are perfectly vertical or horizontal by default, and you can snap other objects to them.

Alignment Guides

To enable Alignment Guides, hold Alt/Option while dragging a selected object or objects in your Workspace.

As you move the selection around, temporary visual guides will appear, indicating when an edge or midpoint of your selection has Snapped into alignment with an edge or midpoint of another object.

Alignment Guides demo

Draggable Guidelines

To create Draggable Guidelines, hover over the ruler to the top or left of the Workspace until the cursor changes to the line icon , then click and drag. Release when you've placed the Guideline where you want it — you'll also be able to adjust its position later.

Dragging from the top creates a perfectly horizontal guideline, and dragging from the left creates a perfectly vertical guideline.

These guidelines are set to the T1 Tool layer, and are treated like any other object in LightBurn. You can move them around, snap other objects to them, or Lock them to prevent accidental movement.

Draggable Guidelines demo

Warning

Since they're set to a Tool layer, Draggable Guidelines will never be output to your laser, but if you're using Current Position or User Origin as your Start From mode, you'll need delete them first, or toggle off the Frame option in the Cuts / Layers Window to exclude them when calculating Origin.

For more help using LightBurn, please visit our forum to talk with LightBurn staff and users, or email support.