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Illustrator CS text stroke?

E

eyeon

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 7, 2004
161
0
Montana, USA
I am the proud owner of the new Adobe CS2 software bundle... and I love it. I am however just now familiarizing myself with Illustrator, and am slowly getting the hang of it. One thing that I cannot for the life of me figure out is how to properly stroke text. Text, like anything else in Illustrator, is treated as an object. I would think that this would logically mean that one could apply a stroke to it, like any other object. You can apply a stroke, but your options are severely limited. The "align stroke" options are ghosted, etc... anyone know of a workaround, or a reason for this twisted logic?

Thanks in advance.
 
tobefirst ⚽️

tobefirst ⚽️

macrumors 601
Jan 24, 2005
4,612
2,335
St. Louis, MO
Well, the simple, not so fun, work around would be to Convert to Outlines. I don't know why the Stroke Align options are grayed. As far as I can tell, though, that is the only option that isn't available as native text, and, I would guess, has something to do with native text still being linked to the font, whereas outlines are no longer font dependent.
 
decksnap

decksnap

macrumors 68040
Apr 11, 2003
3,075
84
Text as text and not as outlines contains a bit of information that probably prevents it from visually aligning wiith other objects as you'd expect it to. Each character has kerning space alotted to it, and each paragraph has linespacing specs, so all you see of a letter is not all there is to it. The traditional way to deal with precise alignment is indeed to convert it to outlines, where it is stripped of this information and becomes a simple object.

Maybe things have changed in CS2, I don't know.
 
macdon401

macdon401

macrumors 6502
Jul 9, 2005
261
0
Stoke

you may already know this "trick" in getting a stroke effect on type in Illustrator, but if you are new to it maybe this will help you out.
Type in your text, edit>copy...paste in back, then apply stroke size to type in back! group the two and resize, change as you like, not perfect but it works!
Hope it helps you out
R
 
A

aboutthat

macrumors regular
Jun 29, 2005
107
0
Washington, DC
I'm only on illustrator CS, but I think the easiest way would be to create a regular old rectangle, apply the style (including stroke) that you want on the text and then create a new graphic style from it. You should just be able to apply that style to your text without worrying about creating outlines, which can be a pain for editing. I'll double check to make sure this works and get back to you...
 
cgratti

cgratti

macrumors 6502a
Dec 28, 2004
782
0
Central Pennsylvania, USA
macdon401 said:
you may already know this "trick" in getting a stroke effect on type in Illustrator, but if you are new to it maybe this will help you out.
Type in your text, edit>copy...paste in back, then apply stroke size to type in back! group the two and resize, change as you like, not perfect but it works!
Hope it helps you out
R
Click to expand...

Macdon401 has the correct technique for stroking text. Always duplicate the text behind the top layer and stroke that.
 
macdon401

macdon401

macrumors 6502
Jul 9, 2005
261
0
glad to help

eyeon said:
Huge help... Thanks a ton!
Click to expand...

glad this helped you out, another thing to remember is the same trick, but paste in front and apply various filters to the type...same goes for paste in the bask! can create some interesting looks!
R
 
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