What’s a counter?

First off, a counter is the opening in a letter; The center of an “o”, the opening in an “e”, those are counters.  This trick will also serve to fill in any spaces in a fill such as those created when a “stroke” in text meets between 2 lines of text.

What’s the trick?

There’s no trick to it – it’s just a simple trick.  I put stroke in quotes up there because this is one of the places we use the Offset Path effect to fake a stroke to add capability not allowed on an ordinary stroke.

Here’s the file, if you want to play along at home.

Apply all of your attributes at the Type layer, leaving your character level with no fill and no stroke.

Add a fill, in this case a red fill.

Add a second fill, and move it below the red fill.  Apricot, in this example.  With that lower fill applied, apply the offset path effect to it by going to Effect -> Path -> Offset Path… I set mine to 3.5 pt, rounded.  This should get you to the upper version of the text – with all the holes in it.

Next – the trick.  Still on that lower fill, after the Offset Path, apply Effect -> Pathfinder -> Divide to it.  Nothing should happen just yet. Now in your appearance panel, click on that effect to edit it.  UN-check “Divide and Outline Will Remove Unpainted Artwork” so that your Pathfinder Options look like these:

Easy-peasy.

I should add that this will also work in any circumstance where Effect -> Offset Path leaves holes that you want to fill, not just with text, though that is where I see the need most often.

I should add – this post is referring to the offset path command, not the offset path effect.  That’s a whole other post that I will get to soon. This is the one that’s located in the Object menu under path.

What it does is to take the bounds of your object and make a new object either inside or outside of your existing object.  It will not work on text unless you’ve created outlines (Type -> Create Outlines).

Example – you have a die line and you want to set up margins. (See the previous post on non-printing layers to see how to incorporate them as well)

Here’s the dieline:

Now, select all the panels you want to make margins for and, from the Object menu, go to Path -> Offset Path…

You’ll see the Offset Path dialog, asking you how far you want the offset to be (in this case, .125 in. inwards, so a negative offset), the way it should treat the corners (in this case Miter, which will leave them square) and in this example, we can ignore the miter limit since we’re working on rectangles.

Viola – margins, which I’ve made cyan so you can barely see them in the screenshot.

Not so difficult an operation to do manually if you were so inclined, but a big time-saver if you do it on every file you make.

That’s about it.  Pretty simple but very useful at times.

The different Join types determine what Illustrator will do at a “corner”

And the Miter Limit  controls when a corner gets mitered (pointy) as opposed to beveled (squared off).  In my experience, it really only comes into play with very acute angles.