Illustrator - Snap to path width outer edges and not to point

Question

Happy New Year!

I have a quick question, maybe there is a way to do this in Illustrator. I have 2 (or more) paths and I would like to build a stack (one on top of each other), but I also want to keep them editable (be able to change the stroke weight of the path).

In the second image you can see that is impossible to perfectly snap the edges and the 2 paths overlap because I also want to have 70% opacity to the path (that is very bad when you print it because it will always show).

Do you know a way to snap and stack multiple paths by the edges (without expanding appearance - that would take a lot of time and I lose edit-ability over stroke weight)?

Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

Some workarounds:

If your paths happen to be closed shapes, align the stroke to inside or outside in the strokes panel. The nodes are at the edges and snap as wanted. See an example:

The green line is in the bottom to show the opacity.

You possibly can supplement some open paths to closed ones and mask the extras to invisibility.

For open shapes you can use a colorless jig to which the paths snap. If the stroke widths are 1 mm and 2 mm, the jig should be a 1,5 mm wide closed shape.

Finally you can allow the overlap. Make a copy of one of the paths, color it fully opaque white and use it as inverted opacity mask for the other:

Red path is duplicated, one of the copies is white and used as opacity mask for the orange path. Theres no clip in use, so the rest of the orange path is intact, only the overlap has been vanished