Many drawing and design programs let you change scales from pixels to millimeters and vice versa... but sometimes you just want to measure something on screen, whether it's a photo, a logo, a button, or the distance between interface options. That's when zzRuler comes in, a digital ruler that is lightweight and easy to use, with support for centimeters and inches, color changes, and alternative fonts.
Some readers might not be convinced of the usefulness of an on-screen ruler, but at the end of the day it's like a scarf or the remote control battery: You remember it when you need it. How many times have we had doubts about the size of a logo or a drawing? How many times have we wanted to check the dimensions of a diagram or a chart in PDF documents? With zzRuler, all those questions disappear.
How to measure something on screen with zzRuler
There's no science here: unzip the zip file and double-click the executable, that's all. A right-click will open its context menu, where you can change its position to vertical, invert or "mirror" the ruler, replace centimeters with inches, adjust its transparency (the default value of 0.8 worked well on this side, but don't hesitate to experiment), and change the font, which uses MS Shell Dlg 2 by default.
Obviously, to measure something on screen we must use its real scale, or all values will be incorrect. For example, in my tests I decided to compare the accuracy of zzRuler with the Paint.NET ruler, and at first I detected small errors, but the reason was the zoom level on the editor canvas, which was at 97 percent and not 100.
To finish, I hope zzRuler continues to incorporate functions in the future. For now, its priorities are two: You can't change the size (it wouldn't be a bad idea to configure its length on wide monitors)... and the ruler doesn't start from zero! Apart from that, it works very well, and it's worth downloading a copy.
GitHub repository: Click here. Official mirror: Click here.
