Snapping Points to the Grid

When the background grid is enabled, the Draw, Snap to Grid (Ctrl/Cmd+G) menu command becomes active. When the Snap to Grid command is selected, all selected points are automatically moved to the nearest grid intersection, as shown in Figure 11.12, and all new points drawn with the Draw tools from that point onward, except for the Freehand tool, are automatically snapped to the nearest grid point.

Figure 11.12. Points snapped to grid intersections.

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This behavior continues until the grid is turned off or until the View, Disable Grid Snapping option is selected. When grid snapping is disabled, a checkmark appears to the right of the Disable Grid Snapping menu command in the View menu.

Controlling Moving Grids

You may notice when you move a layer that the grid is tied to the layer. If you find that this is causing you problems when trying to line up points and objects, you can take a snapshot of the grid and import it onto an image layer or load it as a tracing paper. By doing this, the grid remains stationary on a lower layer. The drawback to this approach is that you can no longer snap to the grid points.