Adobe Illustrator for Windows - convert fill to stroke

Author

convert fill to stroke

Anne_M_Ward@adobeforums.com

2006-08-25, 6:52 am

I've searched Help and Forums, and can find how to convert a stroke to a fill, but not a fill to a stroke. Can anyone help?

thanks in advance
Anne

Alexander Kogan.

2006-08-25, 6:52 am

Hi, Anne

Hmm, and how do you envision the process of converting fill to stroke?

Obviously, you cannot convert ANY fill to stroke, and stroke cannot have variable width (unless it has a brush applied to it), so from programming point of view it would be a task really difficult to accomplish.

What exactly are you trying to do?

If you have an object that once was a stroke and then was converted to outlines, aside of Undoing to the point where it still was a stroke, I know no other way of getting the stroke back.

Update: for simple filled "I was a stroke once" objects you can kinda cheat to get an object similar to the original stroke, for example by offsetting the object to a negative amount equal to 1/2 of the original stroke, then deleting one of the contours.

But if the original object was complex, with lots of "holes" in it, you'd have to manually delete the unnecessary paths, and it's a tedious thing to do.

Fred_Goldman@adobeforums.com

2006-08-25, 7:01 pm

Making it into a brush would be very close.

Alexander Kogan.

2006-08-25, 7:01 pm

Making it into a brush would be very close.

That's an interesting way to see the problem :)

Though making an art brush (I suppose you meant art brush) out of a shape actually lets you "stretch" it along any specific path, not that it'll somehow become a "stroke" in Illustrator terms, but then maybe that's exactly what Anne is looking for :)

Anne_M_Ward@adobeforums.com

2006-08-26, 6:35 am

Thank you so much, both of you, for your interesting thoughts and useful ideas! I think that would be a great work-around, so many thanks for letting me borrow your Illustrator brains for a minute!!

Anne