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I've come across a very strange issue with Illustrator. When I start the app the default stroke alignment is set to "Inside", which is strange as I read that it should be "Center". This is what my Stroke panel looks like just after resetting the Preferences: enter image description here

This means that I can't use Expand on any new object, only Expand Appearance, as it already has some appearance applied to it. The workaround I use is "Reduce to Basic Appearance" from the Appearance panel menu. Is it a bug in my copy of Illustrator or is there something that I don't understand (I'm fairly new to Illustrator)? Is it possible to set the default Stroke alignment to Center? Edit: I use the Web profile, in Print documents the Stroke is set to Center.

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  • Yes, but I have to do that every time I open a new document as these setting are not kept by Illustrator. When there are no open documents the Stroke panel is all greyed out. Every new document in Illustrator still has Stroke aligned to Inside. No way to set it permanently to Center.
    – c_buk
    Mar 19 at 11:04
  • All options are indeed grayed out when no documents are open. But what happens if you tick on New Art Has Basic Appearance in the Appearance panel when no documents are open?
    – Wolff
    Mar 19 at 13:30
  • This is normal behaviour and the default for new documents created using one of the web presets. Nothing is wrong here. It's not a bug.
    – Billy Kerr
    Mar 19 at 13:43

1 Answer 1

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This is normal behaviour, and not a bug. Although one could say it's a bit of an annoyance.

The default setting for strokes is set to inside for all new documents created using a Web preset. I suppose Adobe's reasoning for this is for all web documents to be set up for pixel perfect design. This would not be possible if the default stroke was set to centre.

If you don't intend to set up a pixel perfect design, a workaround would be to customize the settings of one of the Print presets. An RGB document set up in this way will have the stroke set to centre as default.

An example showing customized settings

enter image description here

Note that next time you want to create a new document, if you click on the Recent tab, you should see your Custom profile already set up and waiting for you.

enter image description here

Also note that the presets listed under Art & Illustration, could be used similarly, and are already set up to RGB, but minus the annoying stroke alignment problem.

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  • The entire web documents ecosystem is entirely broken. To circumvent small design problems they have made two major fixes, the snap to pixels, which is implemented wrong thus making neccesery for having a setting for stroke inside and outside. This neccesitates having separate presets. The entire thing is broken by design. Instead they could have just you know listened to the guy who basically invented modern signal processing no they have to do it their way (every eng knows this btw). So they could have just you know made snap to grid snap to a grid half the size, making everything easy.
    – joojaa
    Mar 19 at 15:27
  • @joojaa Adobe can listen? Who knew!! ;)
    – Billy Kerr
    Mar 19 at 16:28

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