Enable Width Tool for brush strokes
Wouldn't it be logic when the Width Tool could be used to fine tune brush strokes?
Let's start to make it available for round brushes.
Jan Vork
shared this idea
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Margaret Trauth
commented
I recently ran into Totallypic's Illustkit plugin, which has a great interface for manipulating calligraphic brushes. It draws little ovals along the path that you can rotate and scale to control the brush.
It only works on calligraphic brushes, though, which is probably my least-used type of brush.
https://totallypic.com/posts/illustkit1
It'd be great to see this available for *every kind of stroke* in *one unified tool*. Simple stroke? Art brush? Calligraphic brush? Bristle? Scatter? Pattern? They can *all* have parameters that change along the length of the path, but the only one with a way to edit it is a simple stroke with the current width tool.
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For the context, a manual for Creature House Expression 3 (thanks, Margaret):
https://archive.org/details/creature_house_expression33_manual/page/138/mode/1up
Pages 43/44, 78, 139, and 177 -
Margaret Trauth
commented
Expression had a great UI for editing the stylus pressure/angle/bearing/tilt curves back in like 2003.
Illustrator added variable stroke widths in 2010 as something completely distinct from art brushes and has never bothered unifying the two. It's 2025 and I'm thinking about this and deciding it probably never will. This year's updates look to be more imagegen spam garbage. Why is this still my main art tool? Inertia.
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Margaret Trauth
commented
It is a continued embarassment that the width tool only works on *some* kinds of brushes.
Art and pattern brushes can be edited with the width tool.
Scatter, calligraphic and bristle brushes cannot be edited with the width tool.Why? Because whoever wrote the specs for the calligraphic and bristle brushes forgot the width too existed, or because whoever wrote the code for the brush didn't bother doing it, and now probably works in a more prestigious division of Adobe. There are so many little holes like this all throughout Illustrator that Adobe can't be bothered to fix for years and years. It's embarassing.
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Jan, actually you can, but for art and pattern brushes only.
