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jamforfrances
Participant
July 30, 2010
Answered

Can't stroke less than 1pt using "Basic" if a path is horizontal or vertical in CS5

  • July 30, 2010
  • 3 replies
  • 46319 views

Hi all,

Something weird happened in Illy CS5 for me. I can no longer stroke lines [or shapes] using the "Basic" brush [the default stroke in Illy] with a stroke of less than 1pt [or its equivalent (like .376 mm for example)] if a line is either horizontal or vertical or if a shape has either a horizontal or vertical line in it. If I take a line that is diagonal and is stroked with a .25 pt stroke and I align it vertically, then the line stroke pops to 1pt. If I take that line and make it diagonal again, then I can change the stroke so that it is less than 1pt again.

Wha?

I have:

1. reset all my preferences [plist as well as CS5 prefs in folder]

2. restarted Illustrator [multiple times]

3. restarted my machine

With no luck. I still have the problem.

A bit before I noticed the problem, I changed a bunch of my unit preferences to millimeters as well as the units for the document and then changed them back to points. I would think that this might have something to do with the problem, but my husband went and did the same thing and didn't manage to incur the same problem.

Help!

      This topic has been closed for replies.
      Correct answer NewYorkFruit

      You are using a 'Web' or 'Flash Catalyst' Document profile, which has a property called 'Align New Objects to Pixel Grid' turned ON by default. This property can be found in the New Document dialog (under Advanced) or in the Transform panel flyout menu. This property helps in creating clean, sharp graphics for the Web & this is a new feature in Illustrator CS5.

      You can turn this OFF to create strokes (horizontal/vertical) with less than 1pt weight.

      3 replies

      V
      VanynaV
      Participant
      March 21, 2012

      I was having the same problem, what I did, following somebody's advice on this post solved it, ticked off the "Align to pixel grid" option for the object to stroke and it did it, the bad thing is that I'm actually working on a shape for a website, still it worked.

      S
      sanatdog
      Participant
      November 7, 2011

      I have this problem with CS5. But I have nailed down reproduction of this behaviour.

      With stroke width set to points in prefs. to start with you can get lower than 1pt text in the line width setttings. So far so good.

      Then I selected the Pen. Set the line width to 0.25 and started to draw an arrow. It all worked until I drew the first acute angle in the arrow shape. And then Illustrator reset the width to 1pt.

      My solution was terrible. After 30 mins of frustration I just opened up Illustrator CS4. It worked.

      NewYorkFruit
      NewYorkFruitCorrect answer
      Inspiring
      July 30, 2010

      You are using a 'Web' or 'Flash Catalyst' Document profile, which has a property called 'Align New Objects to Pixel Grid' turned ON by default. This property can be found in the New Document dialog (under Advanced) or in the Transform panel flyout menu. This property helps in creating clean, sharp graphics for the Web & this is a new feature in Illustrator CS5.

      You can turn this OFF to create strokes (horizontal/vertical) with less than 1pt weight.

        C
        CarloMYK
        Participant
        January 27, 2015

        PROBLEM SOLVED! I have Illustrator CC. I went to the "transform" flyout panel and click on the top right corner and clicked the "show options" and that's where I found the "Align to pixel grid" and I unchecked it and that fixed the problem! Now I can have a stroke line thinner than 1px Thanks @CupertinoFruit

          S
          sgkirk
          Participating Frequently
          September 18, 2015

          Wow - thanks everyone! This solution just saved me...well, in the short term. What I found was that I had to uncheck the "align to pixel grid" for EVERY single line that I wanted to make a custom weight. Any idea how to permanently uncheck this box? And BTW, Adobe: not sure what you were thinking here, but it's really disruptive to work flow. Bleah.


          Any idea how to make this option apply to items that have already been drawn? Its only working for new lines for me :-/ ...This is in CC

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