When expanding stroke, ignore self-intersections/crossovers

[Lindsay Wilson]

Summary: If I have a single self-intersecting curve in Designer (“D” in the attached) and expand the stroke, it produces “E”. The intersections have been erased/joined, however its best to describe. What I’d like it to produce instead is “I”, where the edges of the stroke at the intersections are left alone.

This all arose from my experiments using expand stroke then shape builder to build up interlacing knot work designs. If all the curves are discrete, “A”, then this works great, and produces “C”. However, if any of the curves self-intersect, like “D”, the it fails, because expand stroke doesn’t produce the stroke edges at the intersections. I hope this makes sense.

A fix is to deliberately split the stroke somewhere and then expand the resulting curves. However, there are certain situations where I can’t do this (namely, where I have used a tapered stroke profile) and would really prefer to just expand the one curve directly.

If it was possible to add an option to control how expand stroke behaves at self-intersections, it would be awesome. It could either do the default behaviour, where it simply outlines everything that appears black, or it actually traces the edges of the stroke.

ADDITIONAL: A similar option would also be invaluable for the contour tool! 

[loukash]

9 hours ago, Lindsay Wilson said:

add an option to control how expand stroke behaves at self-intersections

+1!

[MrBazza]

i was about to post the similar. It would be really usefull to have an option to select between three modes ignore self intersections (existing behaviour E above), include self intersections (I) or follow path (H)

[MrBazza]

… clarification … (H) above might still have to be a manual action to get the unders and overs you want but the folllow path option I am suggesting could always pass under (or over) self … perhaps thats another option 🙂