Adobe InDesign - Manual (Page 595)

Compound paths and shapes
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About compound paths
Best practices for editing compound paths
Create a compound path
Change holes to fills in a compound path
Break up a compound path
Change the holes in a compound path
Create compound shapes
Create paths from text outlines
About compound paths
You can combine several paths into a single object, called a compound path. Create a compound path when you want to do any of the following:
Add transparent holes to a path.
Preserve the transparent holes within some text characters, such as o and e, when you convert characters to editable letterforms using the
Create Outlines command. Using the Create Outlines command always results in the creation of compound paths.
Apply a gradient, or add contents that span multiple paths. Although you can also apply a gradient across multiple objects using the Gradient
tool, applying a gradient to a compound path is often a better method because you can later edit the entire gradient by selecting any of the
subpaths. With the Gradient tool, later editing requires selecting all of the paths you originally selected.
Best practices for editing compound paths
Keep the following guidelines in mind as you edit compound paths:
Changes to path attributes (such as stroke and fill) always alter all subpaths in a composite path—it doesn’t matter which selection tool you
use, or how many subpaths you select. To preserve the individual stroke and fill attributes of the paths you want to combine, group them
instead.
In a compound path, any effect that is positioned relative to a path’s bounding box—such as a gradient, or an image pasted inside—is
actually positioned relative to the bounding box of the entire compound path (that is, the path that encloses all of the subpaths).
If you make a compound path, then change its properties and release it, using the Release command, the released paths inherit the
compound path’s properties; they don’t regain their original properties.
If your document contains compound paths with many smooth points, some output devices may have problems printing them. If so, simplify
or eliminate the compound paths, or convert them to bitmap images using a program such as Adobe Photoshop.
If you apply a fill to a compound path, holes sometimes don’t appear where you expect them to. For a simple path like a rectangle, the
inside, or the area you can fill, is easy to see—it’s the area within the enclosed path. However, with a compound path, InDesign must
determine whether the intersections created by a compound path’s subpaths are inside (filled areas) or outside (holes). The direction of each
subpath—the order in which its points were created—determines whether the area it defines is inside or outside. If a subpath is filled when
you want it to be a hole, or vice versa, click Reverse Path in the Pathfinder panel to reverse the direction of that subpath.
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