The feature which allows you to align stroke to inside or outside of a path for closed shapes is fantastic and gives a great deal of dynamic help. Currently, the only way to align a stroked path and another shape is inaccurately with only visual cues or expand the stroked path and lose editability.

I don't know if it has been suggested but a feature which allowed you to preserve a non destructive workflow and interact with shapes more easily is very much within reach. Simply create an equivalent for the align stroke to inside or outside of path for unclosed paths.

Hi - I was directed here via adobe and illustrator support teams on twitter.

I'm submitting a suggestion for a function or feature for adobe illustrator in which the user may subdivide a dashed path into individual smaller paths, by the measurement and placement of said dash style. I have seen many different suggestions and workarounds for this over the past few years but none actually execute this specific action. (Setting to .0001 stroke, expanding, then deleting excess points isn't ideal!)

In my current role, and in our office, we design and create physical package design comps. we frequently use perforations in our designs, often with custom spacing, and use illustrator as a hand-off program for graphics and pre-cad conversion. Currently, the cad programs we use do not read or accept each other's different perforation styles (perhaps the programs see them just as that - styles, thus the paths aren't actually altered). Therefore this suggestion aims to use illustrator, the middleman program for our process, to subdivide a path via its dashes during the design process which in turn translates into a custom perforation in our final comp.

Attached file shows how the function might look/act

Thanks for your time!

When dotted lines with “Aligns dashes to corners and path ends, adjusting lengths to fit” are outlined , unnecessary anchor points are generated in the circles at both ends.

When performing detailed processing to create artwork, I sometimes outline dashed lines. So, unnecessary anchor points are an obstacle in such processing.
Although there are workarounds, I hope that users will get clean outline results without any ingenuity.

Workaround:
(A)
1.Double-click anywhere in the stroke with Width tool to add a new width point.
2.Execute “Expand Appearance” , “Outline Strokes” or “Flatten Transparency”.

(B)
1.Drawing strokes in accurately calculated length with “Keep exact dash and gap length” .
2.Execute “Outline Strokes” or “Flatten Transparency”.

---Japanese Translate---

「コーナーやパス先端に破線の先端を整列」を有効にした丸い破線をアウトライン化すると、両端の丸に不要なアンカーポイントが生成されてしまいます。
細かな処理を行うために破線のアウトライン化をする際、不要なアンカーポイントは作業の妨げになります。
回避策はありますが、ユーザー側が工夫をしなくてもきれいなアウトライン結果が得られるようにするべきです。

回避策：
（A）
1.「線幅ツール」でストロークのどこかをダブルクリックし、新しい線幅ポイントを追加する。
2.「アピアランスを分割」、線をアウトライン」または「透明部分を分割・統合」を実行する。
（B）
1.線の長さを正確に計算してから「線分と間隔の正確な長さを保持」を使って破線を描画する

So far there is no way to de-expand strokes back to live strokes.

The suggested practice is to cut the shape in pieces and blend pairs with 1-step blends, expand and join manually — a tedious solution. We have to keep strokes alive as long as possible if we plan to edit them after. The effects we can use to make an art non-destructive are quite limited.

We now have cool Reform plugin by AstuteGraphics that allows to edit expanded strokes in a different way, but is does not solve the original problem and only helps to workaround and offers fluidity other tools don’t have... it can’t resurrect strokes.

Other solutions, in other apps, try to trace instead of reconstruct, and results are pretty poor most of the time.

I have wanted this to be a feature for over a year now.

As many of us know, we can simply add a profile shape to strokes. We can also create our own profiles! The process of creating profiles is not very user friendly in my opinion.

I think it would be a great idea to be able to state which profile you want for your stroke, and then an addition option comes up that gives you 1 extra boxes:

Minimum stroke weight for the stroke profile

Obviously the "max" stroke weight is changed in the "Weight" section already.

Most the time, I LOVE what a stroke profile looks like, but the line becomes too "thin". This would be an awesome feature that i would use very often.

Does this already exist and I am missing it? If not, what do yall think?

I'm trying to make a typeface in illustrator, but it's so hard when i have to apply multiple different weight in one stroke (especially with serif typeface). So i have manually expand the stroke and edit it manually, and the result is not tidy or clean enough.

I know there is width tool to edit stroke weight, but it behave more like a brush, it will get messy if i want to change stroke weight and not having consistent shape if i cut some part of the alphabet to use it on another alphabet.

So i have an idea if we can edit stroke weight in every single point node so it can be more consistent (maybe it's similar to blend tools smoothness, but it's specific for stroke).

Is it possible to add an option in the Stroke panel which allows scaling of the arrowheads and start and end shapes (like Circle, Square, SimpleWide, Simple, ettc.) without scaling their stroke width?

Now the stroke width of the arrow or shape is increased or decreased when scaling. Please see attached images. Often times I would like to use a bigger arrowhead or shape but I have to create hem manually as scaling up results the arrowhead becoming a wider stroke than the stroke itself.

For instance - a 2 point stroke with a SimpleWide arrowhead results in the arrowhead becoming a 4 points wide stroke at 200% scale.

Please add an option "Keep Stroke width when Scaling". That would really be awesome. Thanks in advance! :-)