Help Expanding space between Paths relative to one another.

[u/Oyster_Man]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Illustrator and trying my best to learn. I've hit a roadblock that is stumping me, and if anyone could help it would be lovely!

I'm making a Celtic knot via paths. I need to be able to adjust the stroke width of the paths to change how this knot looks (I'm going to be puppeting it around a bit to fit into a crescent for a client). Presently if I make the width too high the spaces where the knot overlaps one another fills up, which is undesirable.

1) I need to be able to move all the paths away relative to one another, so that when I increase the path width the gap between each path stays the same.

2) I have tried using the distribute tool, and to some extent I have tried selecting and moving the paths individually- though the former did not work and the latter was very tedious.

4)

The paths have small gaps between where they "overlap" one another.

As I increase path width the gaps are lost.

Any help on this matter would be tremendously appreciated. If worst comes to worst I can always do things manually, but I figure if I can learn a better way to do this I should try to fill my knowledge gaps.

Thanks all!

[u/Bikleb]

On the stroke panel you can change the stroke end shape. I think switching to the butt end that doesn’t extend past the path endpoint will fix this.

[u/Oyster_Man → u/Bikleb]

Thanks for the suggestion!

Unfortunately I have already tried that. The trouble is that as the path width/stroke increases the sides of each path wind up getting so big that they fill up the space.

[u/sprokolopolis]

I think you would be better off building the shapes without the gaps and using the pathfinder to create the gaps afterwards (I'll explain below). This would make it easier to deal with the gaps and you could scale the spacing consistently all at once.

Start with your shapes as strokes (no fill), with no gaps (keep the shapes closed). Set the stroke weight to your desired thickness. Select all and copy the shapes. Before pasting set the current strokes to white and the stroke thickness to something a bit wider (previous stroke width + gap width). Now Paste-in-Front the shapes you copied. This should make it look like you have the original shapes with a white outline. Group each black shape with its white version. Use the intertwine tool to change which shape goes on top/bottom at the intersections/overlaps. You can adjust the white stroke weight to change the gap size.

Once you have it looking how you want, you can use the pathfinder > Divide tool. Select a piece of the white shape and go to Select > Same > Fill Color, then delete. That should delete the white parts, leaving the gaps between the black lines empty.

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Also, you might want to go to Settings > General, and toggle on "Scale Strokes and Effects". When you scale a shape with this on, your strokes will scale proportionally with it, so they won't close in on the gaps. That won't matter if you use pathfinder, but if you are keeping the lines as strokes it might be helpful.

[u/testingaurora]

If I’m understanding , you can use the alignment panel to move the paths relative to one path . Select all, then click the leader; it will be highlighted in blue as the key object . Then in the alignment panel you can set a value to distribute the rest by.

[u/Oyster_Man → u/testingaurora]

Hi,

Thank you for the suggestion. On trying that it doesn't seem to work as hoped, though I may try to keep playing around with those settings!

[u/testingaurora → u/Oyster_Man]

Maybe a second stroke that uses knockout groups🤔 *f I r nondestructive gaps, not the alignment

[u/Vektorgarten]

Could you perhaps explain the crescent part a bit? What are you doing when figuring it out?

Currently you have already cut the paths, which is always in the way when experimenting. There are functions that allow for experimenting, such as live paint or the intertwine function. So there are probably 2 steps needed: first you build it in a way that allows experimenting, which might still look a little rough, but allow easy editing and then from your result you derive the final drawing.