Fan of creative technology, elearning, instructional design and a little geeky

Ins and Outs of Stroke Alignment

December 31, 2007 4 Comments Written by Cari Jansen

Digitip 061 – Adobe InDesign CS3

For those of us setting Ads in InDesign the introduction of the feature that can set Stroke Alignment on border objects to “Align Stroke to Inside” in InDesign CS was welcomed with open arms. Gone were the days of borders vanishing into the Pasteboard gray…

061 - stroke alignment
Changing the default Align Stroke setting from “Align Stroke to Center”, to “Align Stroke to Inside”, means that the stroke weight is always set to the inside of the ad-border.

061 - stroke alignment 2

With ad-borders generally sitting on the edge of the page, changing the stroke weight of the border object now becomes a painless task. Rather than the border falling of the edge of your ad (page), the border expands inwards.

061 - stroke alignment 3

Most of the Object > Corner Options… also take the stroke alignment setting in consideration, as long as you don’t try anything Fancy 🙂

061 - stroke alignment 4

“Bevel”, “Inset”, “Inverse Rounded” and “Rounded” settings all play along nicely. But what happens if you change the Corner Options to “Fancy”?

061 - stroke alignment 5

Well the border all of a sudden expands off the edge of your page, even though it clearly displays fully ‘inside’ the path area of the object containing the stroke. If at this stage you are no longer concerned about the Stroke Weight, the fix is simple:

Change the Align Stroke option to “Align Stroke to Outside” and all will sit nicely inside the page again.

061 - stroke alignment 6

So the motto of the day is:

If you fancy your border on the inside of your pages, set the Align Stroke settings to “Align Stroke to Inside”, unless you go with the Fancy corner option… then change your Align Stroke setting to “Align Stroke to Outside” immediately after setting the Corner Option and … be aware that changing the stroke weight will once again make things fall off the edge of your page.

Adobe InDesign
, , , ,
Similar posts
  • Adobe InDesign and XML: A Reference Guide — The following is a reference guide I have compiled over time for those of you who are looking at doing a little more with XML in InDesign (originally published Feb. 2011, last updated Feb 2018). If you have any extra information you’d like to see added to this guide, feel free to message me. Mapping XML tags to InDesign [...]
  • How to change the colour of bullet points in InDesig... — A few weeks ago I recorded a short quick tip tutorial. InDesign’s Control panel, gives users a quick and easy way to format text as a bulleted list. Highlight the text, and click the Bulleted List button in the Paragraph Formatting Controls mode for the Control panel. This applies a universal bullet character as the [...]
  • Creating a pop-up window in a PDF with Adobe InDesig... — In the following YouTube tutorial, we’ll create an interactive PDF from Adobe InDesign, in which we click on a button, which in turn opens up a simple pop-up window containing a close-box. When the close-box is clicked the pop-up window disappears [...]
  • InDesign: Facing pages with odd-numbered left pages — Back in 2004 I wrote a tip for InDesign CS on how you could have the first page of your document be a left page AND have it start with page number 1. It’s hard to believe this is almost a decade ago… But a recent question on Facebook, made me think I should really [...]
  • Negative Lookbehind – GREP for Designers — This is the fourth and final blog-posts in a series of posts on lookaheads and lookbehinds in GREP, written after speaking at the Perth InDesign User Group. My speaker notes are also available: What is GREP? (PDF download) (2.4Mb). In the previous three posts I briefly introduced GREP, and we took a look at Positive [...]

4 Comments
  1. Dolores Hoffman Dolores Hoffman
    April 20, 2010    

    I want a hairline stroke around a photo. I want a space between the edge of the photo and the stroke. Is there an automatic way of doing this with Indesign CS3?

    Reply
  2. Gary Spedding Gary Spedding
    January 1, 2008    

    It is one of the last posts where he covers making rounded buttons and has a free script on offer to boot. I pointed out that after the script is run and the object expanded you can add a stroke to the rounded object – otherwise the stroke appears on the now “invisible” original rectangle.

    Cool stuff from both of you.

    Reply
  3. Cari Jansen Cari Jansen
    January 1, 2008    

    Cool, I must admit haven’t looked at Mordy’s blog for a bit, but just had a look, there are a few posts on corners not sure which one you’re referring to.

    Reply
  4. Gary Spedding Gary Spedding
    December 31, 2007    

    Cari,

    Check out Mordy Golding’s complementary article (for Illustrator) on the topic of buttons/corners and strokes.
    He posted at his rwillustrator blog and it was presented on one of the Creative sites (I forget the details at this time).

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *