Illustrator CS4: bug hunting!

The good news: Outline Stroke

The first annoying behaviour that came into my mind was the Outline Stroke effect not working as expected when Align Stroke is set to inside or outside.

In Illustrator CS3 the Outline Stroke effect always expands strokes as centered aligned.

A workaround for CS3 owners is to use Object > Expand Appearance instead.

In Illustrator CS4 this has been fixed, meaning that Outline Stroke will respect stroke’s alignment setting.

Comparison between CS3 and CS4 Outline Stroke effect

The bad news: Blurred line under top border stroke

The second REALLY annoying behaviour that I hoped was fixed it’s also about strokes.

Since I do a lot of icons and mockups with Illustrator, I use the Pixel Preview mode to make sure objects are aligned to the pixel grid and don’t have blurred edges quite often. However, I always have to fight with a bug in Illustrator that draws a blurred line underneath the top side of a stroked object. Unfortunately this haven’t been fixed and still an issue in CS4.

This is clearly visible with squared objects: turn on Pixel Preview mode (View > Pixel Preview), draw a rectangular with any stroke and observe the blurred line on the top.

The only workaround I know is to Align Stroke to Outside and then to use the Appearance palette to move the Fill on top of the stroke.

3 Comments

  1. Posted by Steven

    Outline stroke still produces overlapping anchor points like in CS3.

    I know several people who reported this bug to Adobe when CS3 came out. And it is still here in CS4.
    I think Adobe doesn’t read user feedback. This is the proof. An obvious bug hasn’t been removed!

    Adobe, I don’t love you anymore…

  2. Posted by David Vignoni

    @Steven: That’s true, but at least now it doesn’t change the original border alignment.

    I’m afraid Illustrator is too big and old to be easily maintained, I don’t know, but at least the “gradients”:http://www.icon-king.com/thoughts/illustrator-cs4-gradients/ have been finally improved.

    I also like the new tabbed view, and the transform palette is working properly when pixel is selected as unit.

    But yeah, for what it costs it should be perfect! :)

  3. Posted by Chris

    desastrous error imo:

    the function “convert text to outlines”
    when opening freehand files does not work correct, although it claims to work perfect!

    that’s not only very risky, thats not tolerable.