Allow clipping paths to have complex appearances.
Currently, a clipping path can only have one stroke, one fill, no effects, no brushes, no multiple fills/strokes. Well, it can have all the fills, strokes, effects, and other stuff your heart desires, but only one fill and one stroke will be displayed.
I would really like this to change. I use a lot of complex appearance stacks and working around this makes things complicated.
To make this play nicely with existing art, there probably needs to be a switch somewhere for backwards compatibility with existing art that may have a lot of complex appearances on clipping masks.
There also probably needs to be some support for deciding exactly where the masked art goes with regards to multiple fills. Probably by putting the usual "Contents" entry into the Appearance panel for clipping paths.
I don't have a feeling right now on how bitmap effects should alter a clipping path's actual clipping area, but I do feel like vector effects applied to the entire path, whether above all the fills/strokes, or below them, should alter the clipping area.
Margaret Trauth
shared this idea
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Margaret Trauth
commented
I still still still want this.
I've included a sample file to demonstrate why this makes me sad.
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Margaret Trauth
commented
I still really want this. I've probably wanted this for a decade now. At least. I just never got around to asking for it here until 2022. I might have even asked for it in the old bug/feature database.
I've *finally* found some workarounds involving putting the entire clipping group in another group and applying a complex appearance to the entire group, but I have to add a Pathfinder Divide effect with 'remove unpainted artwork' unchecked, followed by a Pathfinder Add effect, to *every stroke or path* I want to apply to the clipping mask, because Illustrator wants to remove the clipping path from consideration for these strokes and paths otherwise, and that's a hassle.
