Breaks in gradients/gradients not rendering

Question

I'm having issues with exporting artwork from Illustrator, which features a stroke (100pt, round cap) with a gradient (2x colours in gradient, applied along the stroke). I keep getting these weird white breaks, almost like some pixels are missing or are not rendering correctly.

I've tried:

Exporting a png directly from illustrator and it appears
Expanding the stroke and exporting and it appears
I've started a new doc and pasted it in there and exported, still appears
I've increased the resolution of gradients in my doc setup setting, still appears when exporting.

When it does NOT appear:

Placing the AI file into indesign, exporting it as a png
Exporting as a jpg from Illustrator
When you expand the stroke with a solid colour, then manually set the gradient with the free form gradient setting and adding in your point to create the gradual fade from one colour to another. > my current solution to the problem

I've checked the artwork and there's no extra points, weird shapes sitting ontop of the path. I've given the artwork file to another colleague and he also can not figure out what the issue is.

Has anyone else experienced this and found a fix?

Screenshot 2026-01-15 at 12.25.00.png

Bobby Henderson · Answer

Have you tried adding any additional anchor points to see if that might make a difference? Edit: I downloaded the PDF file. I didn't see any of the strange glitches along the stroke in GPU Preview regardless of zoom level. But they did show up when switching to CPU Preview. I found that I could make a lot of the tiny white glitches disappear by adding more anchor points to the path. The white glitches also tend to change position or appear/disappear depending on the zoom level. Adding points isn't a 100% good approach though. Even when adding a lot of points to the path a couple white speckles might still appear depending on the zoom level.

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