Align Stroke to the outside of typography is essential for creating readable typography.
Why is it grayed out?

Under Appearance, I can no longer move a stroke below the fill and then enlarge it to grow the stroke behind the fill. Inline for some reason is set and prevents me from customizing it. When did that change? I used to be able to apply styles to live text and play with stroke/fill order to customize looks.

I know we can use the Appearance Palette, but please, make it easy to use outside strokes for text, since it is used a lot, and the appearnce palette is not the best part of Illustrator, to put it mildly.

@EgorChistyakov

I use the Appearance palette All. The. Time. :) It's much easier to see what exactly is going on with something.

I voted for this, and will go vote for the other one. Thanks for the heads up that it exists.

For those who don't know... this was a thing for many decades... the strokes on texts worked back then exactly how they do on shapes today. Still don't understand why they changed it and why it's still not fixed.

It's unacceptable that this can't be done normally, because Illustrator is technologically capable of doing it: simply set a shape to have the stroke on the outside and SAVE IT AS A GRAPHIC STYLE. Then you can use that graphic style on text. It works fine. You can do the same for inside strokes, too. The only thing is that it will be stuck like that, so you'll have to clear appearance settings to change it.

InDesign’s solution to Outside of Text is just a trickery. Judging by a PDF output, what it secretly does it making the stroke twice as thick and puts it behind the characters... A trick that is possible only due to the rudimentary appearance system InDesign has.
Illustrator’s approach is both more powerful, but doesn’t support complex appearance for live characters — this includes inside (especially) and outside strokes

There is s separate, more global request for that:
Allow to set the stroke below the fill in appearance panel for text characters — http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/46545787

...but it’s less popular, since users don’t really know Appearance (sadly) and the connection between the problems is hard to grasp.
Perhaps we should get these merged? What do you think?

It has been years. Please fix this.

Hmm. I do not recall it ever working for text...
I know the alignment of stroke for open paths got recently broken in Beta 28.5.0.78, but then it got fixed in 28.6.0.54.
The buttons though are still not disabled and are clickable — but again, I do not remember them ever working.

As far as I know, the alignment of a stroke is considered to be complex appearance, while the characters in live text can only have a basic one. So it’s more an Appearance and Text problem, rather than Stroke one...

The corresponding request never had a status change: http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/31416682
Which version exactly was supporting it? Please remind me!

This is at least that second time that you have enabled stroke alignment on live text only to disable it in the next update. ENOUGH ALREADY. Obviously stroke alignment CAN BE DONE on live text, so stop fiddling around and just leave it enabled. The workaround is to create a graphic style with an inner or outer aligned stroke and then use the alt-key to ADD that graphic style to the existing appearance, but that's a hassle.

Did you ever solve this? I'm having the same exact problem.

I think this is pretty essential for most designers and since it’s thought that 3D and materials is being brought into Illustrator (still not sure about the performance of all that) looks forward to being able to put materials onto fill, strokes, etc.

Extremely needed

I'm surprised this is still an issue. It was brought up back in 2017 and still nothing. Remember back in 2012 on CS6 this actually worked? How is that Adobe can have something 8 years old be more updated, and they were the ones who originally had the feature? I'm still baffled by what Adobe has prioritized as more important than fixing issues that are this old. I'm constantly finding issues through several different applications that have lasted multiple years without a fix. So many free options these days and it's getting worse not better.

This is such BS. You can do it in InDesign, but you can't in Illustrator. This type of nonsense exists with so many Adobe "features". Effects like 3D bevel and inner glow also have many more options in InDesign than Illustrator. They need cross-compatibility with their own products as a minimum, otherwise, I never know if I can replicate a look to match a project I did in another app...

PS As a workaround, you can convert the text to an object (shift-ctrl-O), then add the outside stroke. You just can't ever edit the text again. This type of nonsense is totally unacceptable considering how much they charge for their bloatware...

I have written out some text and trying to align the stroke to the outside or inside and this isn't working, I have tried this on two different Windows computers.

Both computers are using Windows 10 Pro and Illustrator 24.0.1

I have attached a video so you can see the bug, I also show it on two fonts and a shape which works but the alignment of a stroke and stroke profile don't work on live text.

Strokes around text is not a good design idea anytime. I get the live edit but once your text is the way you want, outline and offset path

In the appearances panel, stroke is never allowed to go behind the type with click and drag.

I have to "trick" it by adding a stroke behind a shape, then making a style and then applying that on the type.

Would love for this bug to be smoothed out.

This is such a basic thing that needs to be able to be done with one click, not jumping through hoops or having a work-around. Illustrator lacks so many basic things. I need to keep type editable. Shows how little Adobe cares about improving Illustrator because they basically have a monopoly on drawing programs.

hahaha, yes, you did, LOL!! been a long week for me.