Can I align a stroke to the inside of a shape with "Apply gradient across stroke"

Question

I am trying to make a gradient going from the edge of a shape to its offset center, to make it look like letters that have been forged or carved in stone, in this style (but with 0° shadows):

Basically, I am trying to give letter O/shape A's appearance to shape B, but without changing Shape B's proportions/thickness. Shape A and shape B are the same object before I apply styles:

Unfortunately, "Align stroke to inside" in the Align panel is disabled for shape A, and I can't figure out why:

Scaling down doesn't work either, even with "Scale strokes and Effects" ticked / unticked.

I looked online, but the only post on Adobe's forums that was remotely close to my problem had to do with shapes within groups. Shape A is not a part of any group:

These are the gradient options:

I would like the gradient to look like it does on Shape A but within the bounds of Shape B. I don't think Offset Path does what I want. I would prefer not to have to expand the gradient for this.

Can I align this gradient stroke to another setting besides "Align to center"?

Answer 1

You cannot select align inside or outside if gradient is set to stroke. If i correctly undestood, shape A consists of 2 stroke - inside and outer and you apply gradient to outer stroke, but in this case you can use shape A with a single stroke, it's just a closed path and then apply gradient to this stroke with appropriate stroke width:

Also you can use Width Tool to achive some interesting results:

If you already have drawn letter forms and you don't want redraw them, gradient along stroke not a solution at all. I am afraid, but in case of 2d soft (like Illustrator) you can not just 'create a style and then apply to all forms', it's more for 3d soft: you create 3d objects, choose light source and get result. Here you should deal with each object's surfaces separatly, keeping in mind light directions and manually recreating lighting/shading effects. You can use gradients applied to form, not stroke (especially several various gradients applied to the same form with various color blend modes) or use mesh, there are a lot of tutorials about this.

Answer 2

You cannot. That's how Illustrator gradient on stroke works.

However, you can cheat using the appearance panel:

Add the gradient stroke to your text and select Path > Offset path in the Appearance panel. Use a negative value to align the stroke to the inside of the text. You might have to tinker with the stroke width / offset value to get better results.

I also added a mask made with the text itself, to control part of the stroke "spilling out" of the shapes.

I don't believe it will be perfect, as you can see in my example below, it distorts a lot depending on the shape of the letter. On the top right corner there's an ellipse with the same gradient applied.