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Answered

Hairline Outlines in Illustrator

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 10, 2012
4 replies
59713 views

How do I create a Hairline outline in ai? I am printing to a laser that only accepts colour as raster to engrave and a hairline RGB Red as vector to cut along. The 0.1mm stroke does not work.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Monika Gause

The pathfinder "Outline" creates strokes of 0 Pt, which are in fact Hairlines. Create a graphic style out of this and apply to your stroke.

D

defaultcf8okl0zm3yg

Participant

Wouldn't it be just great if Adobe fixed this. I guess its simply not possible.

None of this works for me and I simply can not cut with Adobe and the universal Laser system. Hopeless, thanks

U

umututkus

Participant

Still no luck 2023 NOV !!!

A

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @umututkus,

Thanks for reaching out. Would you mind sharing some more details, like the exact version of the OS/Illustrator, details about your workflow, and a screen recording of the problem (https://adobe.ly/4aprck2), so we can investigate this further?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

G

Gernot_Hoffmann

Participating Frequently

PostScript doesn't define hairlines. If the stroke is smaller than a device dependent

limit or zero, then the stroked path is drawn by the smallest rasterized(!) line which

the device is able to draw. That's much more than a device pixel. For rasterizers

with raster cells one may get about two lines per raster cell (cell width= 1/Lpi).

Some tests, mainly p.13:

http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/raster16052003.pdf

Help text from PSAlter (PostScript editor by Quite):

setlinewidth operator
width setlinewidth -
...
A width of zero is accepted. The effect of this is implementation dependent, and means 'draw the
thinnest possible line'. The use of this is discouraged, because on some devices, such as high-resoution typesetters, single pixel wide lines are effectively invisible.

The last statement is wrong. The thinnest possible line is much thicker than a single pixel.

Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann

Monika Gause

Correct answer

Community Expert

The pathfinder "Outline" creates strokes of 0 Pt, which are in fact Hairlines. Create a graphic style out of this and apply to your stroke.

J

j9lemmon

Inspiring

I'm dealing with this same issue in Illustrator CS6.

I find that using Pathfinder outline works to a point. The problem is, the only way I can see the object is to select it; once I deselect it, the object disappears.

But I found that setting the stroke to .001 pt creates a hairline stroke - no matter how much you zoom in, the stroke remains thin.

J

j9lemmon

Inspiring

I'm now using Illustrator 24.1.1 and still finding it difficult to create a hairline stroke.

Here's my issue currently (I posted this under Design & Drawing with no replies):

I switched to a PC running Windows 10 with Illustrator 24.1.1. When I open a file created on my Windows 7 PC using Illustrator 24, the lines are invisible or look extremely faint, and rounded corners show artifacts that look like added vector points that weren't in the original file.I set all stroke sizes to zero, because these are designs for CNC machining. When I open the file on my Win 10 PC, the strokes are .0001 mm in Properties.

On my Windows 7 PC, I could see the strokes, even though the were zero stroke size. If I draw a new object with a stroke size of 0, I cannot see the lines at all when I deselect the Object.

Any ideas? (There's a place on Adobe.com where you can vote to improve this issue, but now I can't find it).

Image attached of the artifacts on rounded corner.

Steve Fairbairn

Inspiring

Turn off Align to Pixel Grid and you can make strokes of any weight.

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