On occasion you may experience 'spiking' when applying a contour to some fonts.

Contour failures occur for a number of reasons, but the 2 most common causes are:

1. The font is complex and has many jagged lines. This is common in distressed, grunge or script fonts.
2. Errors in the font file itself. It is not uncommon for fontographers to inadvertently place extraneous nodes outside the font character glyph path. These 'extra' nodes are invisible, but have potential to create spiking as the contour algorithm interprets them as part of the font outline path.

If you experience contour spiking, there are a couple tricks you can try.

TRICK 1:

Break apart text then recombine.

To do this, perform the following steps.

1. Remove all text effects from the text object.
2. Select the text object, then select Shaping-->Break Apart By Curves from the top menu. This will convert your text to individual vector shapes.
3. Select all of the vector shapes, then select Shaping-->Combine from the top menu. *You will need to recolorize your text object after the break apart/combine process.
4. Double click the text object to load the editor.
5. Apply a contour effect.

TRICK 2:

Weld text object before applying the contour effect.

To do this, perform the following steps.

1. Remove all text effects from the text object.
2. Select the text object then select Shaping-->Weld from the top menu.
3. Apply a contour effect.

Watch a short 'how to' video

*Remember no contouring algorithm is 100% accurate, there are simply too many input variables to account for every instance.