Selecting outlines of curves

[Rob2D]

Hey guys,

So this is a hard question for me to ask because I'm not even sure what I want to do. I followed a tutorial to draw up some text with a drop shadow or whatever, and I want to cut around it after printing. And the way my printer does that is by looking for a spot colour stroke around whatever it is to be cut. 

But my problem is that when I stroke all the layers, it of course makes a line around the underneath layer i.e. the shadow. And so my machine will want to cut all of those lines. But obviously I only want to it to cut around the outside. I have tried adding it all into one layer but that's no good as it made it all one colour. 

Is there anyway I can just select the outline of what I have and put a stroke/spot colour around that????

I'll attach some pictures of what I mean. 

Thanks.

[BarKeegan]

If you use the Expand Stroke command on a stroke, it will be converted to a solid fill which can be Subtracted from any other solid fill. This might help when your trying to isolate certain areas. You might have to Ungroup each of the letters and Subtract the outlines from the original shapes individually to avoid ‘unexpected’ results. Might help