Turn expanded strokes back into simple editable strokes?

Adam,

I believe the fact and emphasis of such clipart being vector artwork will lure many into believing that it is fully and easily editable/flexible, ready to be used directly in connexion with new artwork, rather than just as a fixed appearance that can be scaled.

A double delivery, one with editable and one with outlined strokes might make more merry.

Most vendors selling clip art require any line stroke effects (among other types of effects) to be expanded into raw paths. That's because the artwork may be imported into any number of graphics applications. Not all will treat live line strokes in the same manner. Some settings built into those line strokes could be disregarded. That's a big danger.

One of the very first things anyone does when placing a piece of clip art into a layout is they re-size it. Line strokes in various pieces of artwork are very often not set to scale automatically when the art is re-sized bigger or smaller. The strokes remain at the same size. That forces the user to go back and manually expand the line strokes or change the stroke settings. If the artwork is complex that can lead to a big waste of time. Such things can get really infuriating fast.

So, yeah, I'm firmly on the side of the clip art vendors requiring line strokes to be expanded into raw, scaleable paths.

Adam,

The wish to unOutline Stroke has led to many threads; suggestions have included simple use of negative offset to mimic stroked paths (which shorthens open paths) and blends (leading to stroked paths), and also the Stroker action by Kurt.

As it appears, the often suggested roundabout way of using negative offset to get an apparent stroke weight has two fundamental limitations/flaws:

1) You can only work indirectly, unintuitively, and somewhat inaccurately, by trying to choose a negative offset of (approximately) half the difference between the width of the outlined path and the desired stroke weight, often on slanting and/or curved lines; in other ways working backwards;

2) The fundamental shape of every single open path will be changed, shortened by the negative offset in both ends, and all combinations involving one or more ends of such paths will be changed, such as abutments, small gaps, projection of one past another.

Nope.

Mylenium