Reflect tool changes stroke alignment, which then becomes uneditable

Question

I’m trying to use the Reflect Tool to create symmetry.

By the look of it, it seems as if the path on the left has an outside stroke alignment and the path on the left has an inside stroke alignment.

However, when I open the stroke settings panel both are displayed to be aligned to the centre.

On top of that the “Align Stroke to Inside” and “Align Stroke to Outside” options are greyed out for both paths.

Anyone know what could be causing this? Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

I think it has to do with the width profile, so I tried to flip the width profile. However the vertical one doesn’t give me the result I want and the horizontal one is greyed out.

Answer 1

This is not an Inside/ Outside Stroke Alignment issue. The reason your Inside/ Outside alignment options are greyed out is because you are working with an open path. Illustrator only gives these stroke alignment options for a closed path- which makes sense because Illustrator does not know what is inside or outside of an open path.

I can confirm that if you have a path with a width profile which is non-uniform (weighted to one side of the stroke) then using the Reflect tool will result in a Stroke that is "Flipped Across" the Stroke as you are experiencing.

The solution to this is to hit the "Flip Across" button in the Stroke Panel- with only that particular Path selected.

This seems like a bug to me but maybe for Adobe this is working as expected- you would have to check with Adobe on that.

Side Note- Interestingly, when using the Mirror Me plug in from Astute Graphics the non uniform stroke profile does reflect properly- this is what makes me think this is perhaps an Adobe bug.