Easter Egg Stroke Styles
It’s Friday, and my brain is pretty shot from doing conference sessions all week. So I think it’s time to revisit an old easter egg which has gotten (very slightly) improved in CS4. This undocumented easter egg has been around for years:
- Choose Stroke Styles from the Stroke panel menu.
- Click New.
- Choose Stripe from the Type pop-up menu.
- Give the stripe this name: Rainbow
- Click Add (to add it and keep making more strokes) or OK (if you’re done making strokes).
There are a number of other stroke styles you can make. For example, use a Dash (instead of a Stripe type) and name it Woof, Happy, Feet, or Lights. Here are the results of each of these special stroke styles applied to lines:
Now, in CS4, there is one more: You can make a stripe called Rasta. It’s sort of like Rainbow… but different.
No, you can’t make your own. No, you cannot customize these. Yes, they really do print.
The fact that InDesign can put relatively arbitrary shapes along a path like this leads me to wonder if we will someday be able to create our own. But I’d be pretty happy if we could even just import the custom Brushes made in Illustrator. That would be truly awesome. Well, a guy can dream, no?
Slightly cool, thanks. But what I wonder about Easter Eggs is this: how the heck to people find out about them?! Do the programmers just let this secret stuff “slip out” when they’re having a beer with buddies? Surely no one sits at their PC and tries out zillions of weird words for line styles — like “Woof, Happy, Feet, or Lights” — just to see if something odd happens? So out with it, David: did you slip an Adobe programmer a mickey-finn — or what?
The Friendly Alien is also still there!
I did some experimenting. It seems that once you create an Easter Egg stroke style, it is not persistent. However, if you create the style and then use the save button, close the panel and use the load button to reload the style, it is persistent.
Further, the save button creates a file ending in ‘.inst’ (on windows). It should be possible to create custom strokes if one knows the specs for these stroke style files.
Bear in mind that you can use text on a path to create what look like custom strokes. For example, if you want to indicate a route through a township map, attach an arrow symbol from Zapf Dingbats or draw a fancy arrow and attach it as an inline. Repeat it as many times as you like and set the justification to Full Justification.
Dave
Thanks for the reminder, Dave. There’s a post on that here.
“Lights” is great!
If I’d known about that in my last job, I’d have been using it all the time for things like cheap Christmas cards and Christmas brochures, etc.
Thanks for this.
I thought the Alien was a Quack contrivance