Question about Line/Stroke

[hseiken]

Another user's problem that was posted here prompted me to do a little digging and I came up empty so I thought I would ask this specific question;

Is there a way to change stroke alignment to the actual shape/line? For instance, some software allows 'center'/'outer'/inner' in terms of alignment of the stroke.

I have attached images to show the effects of these settings.



Is there anything within Xara to control this in lieu of simply generating contours and doing shape difference combinations?

It's not of major concern and is not a deal breaker, but the question was asked in regards to typefaces in which this feature would be rather useful short cut as the only way I found to deal with the user's problem was quite...an effort and involved a lot of resizing and retooling and lots of spare workspace that could all be essentially condensed down into a small addition to the line-gallery's header area where you can select point size and join type.

Like most things I ask here, usually I am at fault myself for not seeing that stuff I ask for is already inside of Xara, so I'm hoping that is the case here and we can put another notch in my belt for 'asked for features already in Xara'.

[mwenz]

There is no ability to set an outline. It's always the middle. So contour is the only option.

[hseiken]

Actually, I just thought of another way, maybe a little more intuitive for some people and definitely recommended if the lines are closed loops for reasons that my 'demo' will show.

Step 1: do all your editing, keeping in mind whether you want to use inner or outer loops. Think/plan ahead (they use to call this 'committing to your idea'! )
Step 2: set it's line weight to double what you intend it to be. If you had a weight of 4, change it to 8. This is because the line's origin is the center and we're about to cut it in half with itself.
Step 3: duplicate the line now.

Step 4: Convert the bottom one to shape.
Step 5: select both the line version and the shape version then 'combine' using the 'slice/cut' method

Step 6: break shapes and delete the half you don't want.


If you want, you can change the thickness and color of the your 'cutting line' so you can fix the problems that showed up here with the 'eyes' in the super-happy face. In order to make the operation work correctly, I made the eyes and mouth one shape using 'join shapes' but because of the end-caps on the fat line, the regular line doesn't extend the entire way. If I had thought about it more, I would have realized I could have fixed it so that it cut correctly by simply editing the tips of the line to protrude past the endcaps. This is why I say this technique is more useful for loop shapes, such as text strokes, which was initially what the original question in the other thread was concerned with.

Again, this was spur of the moment idea and maybe not the best demo, but hopefully it shows the idea and someone can use it. I find making copies of the same shape on top of itself and doing slight alterations and then cutting it with itself has tended to lead to many really cool effects and now it can also be used to fill in a feature that is rarely needed.

[mwenz]

I use the ability to set the line position in every software that offers it. Which is just about everything else but Xara products.

I've used all 3 types of work-arounds in XDP. A new necessary evil of sorts when I desire to use XDP.