Here’s an obscure (but cool) little feature that you might not have noticed in CS4 by yourself: You can now adjust the stroke joins and alignment on text! Even though you have always been able to stroke text, these features were curiously absent in earlier versions. For example, here’s some text with a stroke around it:
Here’s the same text after setting the stroke to align on the inside instead of the outside:
And finally (this is the one I really like), here’s the text (set back to Align to Outside), using the Round Join in the Stroke panel (instead of the normal Miter Join):
Unfortunately, you still cannot apply a stroke style, so no dashes, dots, or stripes. Also — contrary to at least one marketing sheet I’ve seen from Adobe — you cannot adjust the stroke cap (probably because there are no open paths in text). Perhaps CS5? Anyway, at least you can now do some nicer outlines without having to convert the text to paths.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on October 29, 2008
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