Drawing with pen tool in Publisher: Why is path line visible and how to turn off?

[Evan Evans Wines]

Hi all. Image attached. I am drawing lines with wide stroke values, but for some reason the line of the path is visible when I close the last node. This faint line appears when I export .pdf and .jpg files too, which is causing me a headache. Snapping candidates are off. Any ideas to make it invisible? Thanks in advance.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Does it only happen when you have a Fill on the curve you've drawn?

[loukash]

5 hours ago, Evan Evans Wines said:

This faint line appears when I export .pdf and .jpg files too, which is causing me a headache.

This happens if the stroke align is set to Outside. To me it looks like a rounding error in the method how Affinity calculates vectors. Affinity's strokes are a p.i.t.a. which you can often experience if you attempt to convert strokes to outlines. From what I can say, those long known issues haven't been fixed in v2 yet. But the engineers are apparently aware of the problems, as I've been told last year.

If the PDF is intended for print, then the line should remain invisible when printed. Note that no matter how far you zoom in, the line always remains just 1 screen px wide. Similar white lines would also be visible when inspecting e.g. a flattened PDF/X-3 in Acrobat, not just PDFs from Affinity but also PDFs from InDesign or Illustrator. I never had problems with them in print.

5 hours ago, Evan Evans Wines said:

Any ideas to make it invisible?

An easy workaround:

1. set stroke align to Center
2. double the stroke width
3. set stroke order to Draw stroke behind (the fill)

If you also have Designer you can do instead:

1. open the document in Designer (either File > Edit in Designer, or the Designer persona
2. Appearance panel > duplicate the original "Outside" stroke
3. move the duplicate behind the fill 
4. set the duplicate to align: Center, that will fill the tiny gap from behind