🚀 go-pugleaf

Cindy,

That request comes up here all the time. It really isn't workable. You'll soon find that you don't want the thickness settings to be locked to the positions of anchorpoints, because you're not going to want the thicknesses to be locked to the shape of the spine path.

So on-object variable thickness control would end up requiring yet another set of handles along the path, just for controlling thickness. I serously question the real-world value of this.

Look, you want to be able to vary the thickness of a stroke. You can already do that with an Art Brush. Example:

1. Rectangle Tool. Draw a square.
2. Rotate Tool. Rotate it 45 degrees.
3. Remove Anchorpoint Tool. Click the left anchorpoint to remove it.
4. Drag the resulting triangle to the Brushes Palette. Define an Artbrush.

Now draw a path of any shape. Apply the Brush. You now have a "stroke" that increases thickness along the path.

But you want it lighter or heavier weight overall. Adjust the stroke weight in the Stroke dialog.

You want it going in the opposite direction. Change the direction of the path, change the direction of the Brush, change the direction of the Brush as it is applied to just that path (doubleClick its listing in the Appearance Palette), or make a pair of Brushes from the beginning (as I often do).

But you said you want the start of the path to be 1 pt, not zero, and then to be 5 pt. at the end. Fine. Instead of a triangle, create your ArtBrush from a trapezoid instead of a triangle.

Now... apply that trapezoid Brush to an ess curve. Works fine. Starts at 1 pt.; increases weigth to 5 pt. at the other end. But now you decide you want it to start at 5 pt., shrink to 1 pt. at the middle of the ess, then increase to 5 pt. toward the end.

Now, you could easily build a Brush that does that, too, but consider this:

So you use one of the methods explained above to make a "reverse" of the trapezoid Brush. You cut the ess path at the middle, where you want the thin to occur, and reverse the direction of one half.

Now you encounter one of the key problems with all these half-baked suggestions for on-object stroke weight adjustment handles: The place where the "thin" changes directions has a kink in it. Do you want that kink? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. How will you control the "smoothness" of the change of direction of the stroke weight curve? Your tidy interface is going to have to get more complicated. It's going to have to include some kind of "direction handles" at each of the weight-change key points.

Now I ask you: What feature in AI already gives you that control? Answer: ArtBrushes.

Now consider the real-world practicality of all this. What do you want to use this for? Drawing calligraphy-like flourishes? You try that with any more than one or two intermediate thickness keys along a given curve, and you'll find the smoothness of the result is quite difficult to control. An ArtBrush thoughtfully-built from a simple geometric primitive is easier to control.

Or do you want to use it to give your cartoon line drawings more of a hand-drawn look that is more convincing than the almost always unsatisfying results of Calligraphic Brushes? Do you really want to adjust handles on each and every path you draw in a cartoon? Try some of my simple geometric ArtBrushes and see if you really need more than two or three variants to get the look that you want.

The idea sounds great on the surface, but if you give careful thought to the actual implementation, you'll find it isn't as workable as you first think. And for the vast majority of practical uses, simple ArtBrushes already facilitate it.

Some here have even mocked-up elaborate fake "interfaces" for a separate window in which to tediously describe a "profile" of a varying stroke that would then later be added to paths; all the while failing to realize that is essentially what ArtBrushes already are--except you don't need a separate dialog to do it; you can do it right there on the artboard, and then update the ArtBrush.

I fully expect that if Adobe spent development time in pursuit of a separate dedicated interface and feature set for this, the end result would be as awkward to actually use as the on-path handles for pathType objects, and as tedious and time-wasteful as all the tweaks and twiddles in LiveTrace.

All that's really needed is a few thoughtful improvements to the already-existing Brushes feature set. How about an "isolation mode" (or edit window) for Brushes, instead of having to drag an existing Brush onto the artboard, edit it, and then drag it back to update it? Then do some work on improving the mitering of Brushes where they encounter corners and sharp bends in the spine path.

The usefulness of other Brushes (particularly Pattern Brushes) would benefit hugely from just a few similarly modest improvements, too.

JET