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Hairline Outlines in Illustrator

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
March 10, 2012
4 replies
59823 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 !!!

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.

A

Anonymous

Monika, has this always been the intended use of the Outline pathfinder, and I've just never known it?! All these years I wondered. Do you know of other uses for this command?

Also, I'd always been taught that .25 points is a hairline and that 0 points simply doesn't register (won't print). I think what you're saying is that a 0 point stroke is in fact a hairline – not .25 – and 0 points will in fact output, yes?

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

I promise to stop this rattling on after one more question: What IS the stroke weight of FreeHand's Hairline stroke? Is it 0 (zero)? Or is it only an instruction to the output device to lay down the thinnest stroke it can, whatever that may be?

Just to control if my 0,09 pt assumption is no phantasm, I launched FH 10. In that version the hairline is indeed defined by a stroke weight of 0,09 pt (to be precise: 0,0882 pt).

Well, Doug, after all we now have a rock-solid definition about the true stroke weight of hairlines, right?

Steve Fairbairn

Inspiring

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

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