text with outline and no fill

[wscrcom]

Im struggling a bit with a piece of text; I just want the outline with a transparent centre. 

 

If I just set a stroke, the stroke goes 'inside' the letters.

 

If I set an 'outline' in fx, then remove the fill, it removes the outline itself.

 

I have tried making another 'punch out' image and using geometry, but it axes all of the letters, not just the centres.

 

The only way I can think of to do it is rasterise the image and then 'erase' the centre, but this would be messy and inefficient.

 

I know this should be straightforward, but appear to be pretty well stuck now. 

 

I assume this is something real simple that I am missing. 

 

Can anyone enlighten me?

 

Thanks

 

Jim

 

 

 

[MikeW]

Hi Jim,

 

Set an outline, then switch the proxy to the fill (or vice versa) and click the proxy shown in the screen shot.

 

[wscrcom]

Hi Mike

 

When I do that, the outline goes inside the shape

 

Jim

[R C-R]

Set the stroke alignment to outside (third icon in the bottom row of the Stroke panel).

[wscrcom]

Thanks. That has improved it but theres still a lot of incursion inside the shape, I think caused by the letter spacing.

[MEB]

Hi wscrcom,

You have to build this in a different way if you want to enlarge the stroke keeping the letters as they are:

- duplicated the text (to keep a copy of the original) and convert it to curves

- selected all the letters (curves) and add them (boolean operation) to create a single object from them 

- then apply a stroke to this object if needed.

Changing its stroke will enlarge the black outline around the letters without affecting them.

[wscrcom]

Hi Meb

 

Thanks for responding. 

 

This lettering was originally in a logo that I made for a local business  http://prntscr.com/ch266l

 

what I am trying to do now is replicate the logo in line only to make a watermark for some photos. 

 

So what I actually want to achieve would look like this http://prntscr.com/ch26l0  but with transparency inside the letters instead of white. 

[MEB]

If you need the center transparent subtract the letters from the black object created as described in my previous post (if you want to keep everything as vectors). [EDIT] you just need to remove the fill instead.

[wscrcom]

Worked!  Thankyou!

[Alfred]

To go from this

 

 

to this

 

 

I simply converted to curves, ungrouped the result and then clicked on 'Add' on the Geometry toolbar.

 

[Bri-Toon]

I'm glad the issue was solved, but for the future, in regards to post 5, is there a "kerning" option in the paragraph formatting? Kerning will space out the letters. Doing that, you won't have to convert to curves.