Inside offset has pointed ends

[barclayb19995441]

I'm trying to do inside offset on an ellipse but when I do it I get pointed ends on the ellipse.  Only way I could do it was to scale down my ellipse to size of inner I wanted then do outside offset.  Is there a way to do it by doing an inside offset?  Duplicating and scaling of course doesn't do it.  What's the correct way to accomplish this?  Thanks

[Bobby Henderson]

The pointed ends inside the oval is just a consequence of geometry. The offset path effect creates a new path at a consistent distance parallel to the existing path. Pointed ends will always eventually occur when the offset setting inside an oval path is made large enough. Creating a smaller oval rather than just using the offset path effect is one work-around, but the distance between the two paths is not uniform. Another work-around is manually editing the pointed ends or using a corner filet effect tool. A number of Illustrator plug-ins out there will do it.

[meganchi]

If you duplicate the ellipse, then go to your transform panel, in the width or height box, place your cursor at the end of the measurment values, then type a minus sign and .25 (or whatever your offset value needs to be), and hit enter.

[barclayb19995441]

Thats cool but it isn't symetric  I want it to look like this on right

[meganchi]

It will be if you uncheck the constrain height/width icon in the transform panel. Enter the value one at a time on the width and height dimensions.

[barclayb19995441]

yeah its pretty close but I guess it's just another technique to do it.  Still looks a little different from the one that is offset on the right from the inner ellipse

[SJRiegel]

You can do the offset path, and then use the corner widgets to round off the points

 

[barclayb19995441]

thanks, I forgot about those.