Pathfinder: Minus-front - unwanted slimming effect

[Tommy D]

Hello,  

Goal: I trying to use minus-front to create a single-color design for a t-shirt print project. The shirt color will be green. In my design, the green items are the front items that I want to 'knock-out'.

Issue: performing minus-front slims the knockout. My image and text become thinner. (See attached A/B examples). Yes, it's slight, but I don't want slimmer. What's going wrong?

Specifics: In both cases, the green layer has no stroke, is outline/no longer font in the case of the text, and is a compound path. The black layer that I'm trying to knock thru also has no stroke and is a compound path. There are no active appearance effects on the layers.

Further: I've 'minus-front'ed other objects on this design with no noticeable problem. Is it possible that because other items were bigger the slimming effect was less noticeable? Or is there a solution?

Thanks in advance!

[pixxxelschubser]

I'm not sure if I understand you right.

But: does make [Ctrl]+[E] any difference for you (toggle Preview on CPU/GPU) ?

[Ton Frederiks]

Try if an opacity mask works better.

Fill the green items with white and group them.

Select the white group and the black object below it.

Click Make Mask in the Transparency panel (Uncheck Clip and Check Invert Mask).

Add a green background below it.

[Tommy D]

On-screen this works like a charm! No noticeable slimming effect at all. Wonderful, Thx!

The Big Question: Can I send this to a screen printer to apply as one-color (black) to a green t-shirt since those items aren't actually cut out of the black?

 

[Monika Gause]

When printing, the black might even get fatter than on screen, because the color is pressed onto the fabric.

[Ton Frederiks]

As Monika said, it is caused by anti-aliasing.

And it is a display artifact (that could be a problem when exported as an image (depending on the chosen anti aliasing algorithm))

Does the screen printer accept vector files? It should not be a problem.

If he wants an image export, the opacity mask should work.

But the result from the Pathfinder exported as image should also work when Art Optimized is used for anti aliasing.

[Tommy D]

Ok, there a few things for me to dig into here.

The printer would like the art in vector format.

I trust I can sort it out from here. Thanks for the tips and feedback!

[Monika Gause]

That is probably just the effect of antialiasing. Antialiasing makes the object fatter, because it seems to happen to the outside. When there is no green object, but only a black one, then the black one "eats" the green hole.

Please embed images in posts instead of attaching them.

[Tommy D]

Sorry about the image embedding/vs attaching - I wasn't aware of that (me=newbie to posting examples).

I appreciate the feedback! Now I know!