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Illustrator 25.2 / MacOS
I have a map created at length using the Pen tool with many many line segments made with many 1pt red lines. I now want to colour specific lines green, but when I do so nothing happened. I can indeed set both stroke and fill to nothing and still have red lines.
By setting the line width to >2pt I can see that my single stroke is being drawn as if it was outlined, with a red outline of 1pt and a possibly-green fill. I cannot see why this might be the case in the controls, and if I make new paths, using either the Line Segment, or pen tools, or even the Text tool, I get this 'outlined' style automaically.
Please help!! What's going on, and how can I reset to 'normal' behaviour?
[The only possibility of a hint I have is that I did use live trace on an imported image, on a different layer. I don't see any reason for this to make a difference but some docs mention a live paint selection might behave like this. However, I'm not editing the trace, which was on a different layer, and the trace was imported after the wrongly-outlined paths were made.]
You could read about the layers panel and about the appearance panel. There are several use cases for it, but I don't think each of them is described in great detail in the documentation.
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/user-guide.html/illustrator/using/layers.ug.html
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/user-guide.html/illustrator/using/appearance-attributes.ug.html
e.g. if you want to create a map, then you can apply two strokes to the layer (instead of the path) and you get crossroads
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There might be some not so obvious appearance attributes at different levels.
Can you share the Illustrator file (possibly with some further instructions), so on may have a look at it?
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I can share the file, though it's about 10MB currently.. is that ok?
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This is the file -- it opens showing the line I wanted to recolour, though many of them seem to suffer from the issue.
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That's ok.
Just upload it to a file sharing server like Google Drive or the Adobe Cloud server and provide a public link.
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Can you get that?
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The red stroke is applied to the layer.
Open the layers panel and then click on the target symbol (the circle) of the lines layer. And then open the appearance panel and there is your red stroke. You can also change it there.
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Many thanks for that... i had no idea that layers could have styles in that way. All sorted now. 🙂
Is there a help topic I can read so I know how to use that properly?
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You could read about the layers panel and about the appearance panel. There are several use cases for it, but I don't think each of them is described in great detail in the documentation.
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/user-guide.html/illustrator/using/layers.ug.html
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/user-guide.html/illustrator/using/appearance-attributes.ug.html
e.g. if you want to create a map, then you can apply two strokes to the layer (instead of the path) and you get crossroads that are easily editable. Move the paths around or edit them or add paths will add tothe roads.