Transcript:
[MUSIC] If you’ve ever tried to put a stroke around text in Adobe Illustrator and kept it editable, so you didn’t outline the text or expand it. You actually kept it as editable text. You notice that you cannot align that stroke to the outside? You can only align it to the center of your text. I found a little hack in illustrator, and I’m going to show you how you can actually align that stroke to the outside of your text, and we might even look to see if we can align it to the inside as well. So first we need some text. I’m going to use t for the type tool and we’re going to type something out here. How about just the word outline? Now we can just scale this up with the selection tool and make sure we hold shift to keep it all together. Alright, so we have this piece of text here. What I need to do is actually ignore the fill and stroke over here in the properties. I’m going to even turn off the fill itself, so we have kind of a blank piece of text. We can’t even see it. As long as it’s selected, go up to window down to appearance, we’re going to pull this appearance panel out. We’re going to ignore this one over here in properties because they act a little different so first we want to add a fill, so we’re going to add this fill back in simply a fill of black, so we can adjust this if we want. So maybe I want this text to be red instead of black right next. We have this stroke option up here. If the fill didn’t add a fill and a stroke in your appearance panel, you can also add a stroke option yourself. If you want to, so there’s a little stroke. Add new stroke down here. You could do the same thing, but with this guy up here. What we want to do is just give him a color. We’ll say black and then a stroke point, so we’ll do 15 now as you go up with this, you’ll notice that the stroke covers the fill of your text. That’s because this acts like kind of a layer’s panel, so the stroke is actually on top of the fill itself to make it appear outside of your text. What you want to do is drag this stroke underneath the fill. So once I drug that down below the fill, the fill is showing up on top of the stroke underneath this gives the appearance of the stroke being outside of the text. It’s still technically in the center or aligned to the center, but it’s outside the text. Now if you need a specific weight of that stroke, all you need to do is divide this number by two, So right now I have a 30 point stroke. That means the outside is actually 15 so if we created a square out here that was 15 by 15 hit, okay. It’s got a stroke on it right now. Turn that off just by hitting zero in my stroke panel. So this square is 15 by 15 notice how it aligns just perfectly with the weight of the stroke. That’s because underneath here. If I click on my text and kind of turn off my fill, I actually have a stroke of 30 point, but my fill since it’s centered covers up half of that. So if you need a specific stroke weight, all you have to do is add two times the amount. So if you need a 15 point stroke, add a 30 point stroke and it’s going to be 15 on the outside now. If we want this stroke to actually be on the inside of our text first. I want to drag the fill back down next. I’m going to maybe tone this stroke back a little bit to 10 point, and then next what we can do is actually on this stroke. In our appearance panel, we can add an effect and that effect can be an offset path with this offset path. If we go back down to zero, nothing actually happens. The path isn’t offset, but if we go into the negatives, we’re actually moving the stroke into the inside of our text notice how we’re actually going so far inside that it’s within the actual fill itself. So what you want to do is try to match this up to the edge of the outside of your text. So if I move this back, I’m just using my up and down arrow keys. I think right here somewhere between these two. I might pick offset negative 4 on this. I’m actually on the inside of my fill. And why would you want to do this well? You might use a stroke. That’s actually not the same color, but maybe, like a little lighter to add like a highlight on the inside of your text or a million other things that you could possibly do with this stroke, but that’s another way since you cannot align that stroke. Now if you’re aligning the stroke to other shapes in your document, so let’s just create something like a square shortcut is M for the rectangle tool. So I have this square here. The actual stroke options gives me the ability to align the stroke to the inside the outside or the center. But when you have text that stroke is grayed out on the outside and the center, why not really sure? But with text in illustrator, you can’t just click on those simple options, so we’ve got to run through what we just did where we add the fill and the stroke in the appearance panel and we put the stroke underneath the fill that stroke now shows up underneath the fill and outside of it instead of on top of it centered and then you could use the offset path to actually create a stroke on the inside of your text as well and this text is still completely editable. So I can come back here and edit this text. I hope this little hack helped you guys out. It’s been something! I didn’t think I could do in illustrator for a long time, which was create a stroke on the outside of my text. But with the appearance panel, there’s a lot of different effects that you can actually create with the strokes with the fills. You can add multiple strokes and offset those so you could create like an outline that’s extending out beyond or like multiple. I think I even on the main channel have a similar tutorial like that, where we use multiple strokes and offset path to create a cool outline effect. And by the way you can download this. If you want to see it for yourself in the pixel bracket vault, there’s a link in the description where you can download this exact file. I’ll put a CS6 version and an illustrator 2020 version in there for you guys, thanks for watching. Thanks for subscribing. I’ll see you next time. [MUSIC] Oh, so we are recording [Music].