Shapes, lines & the Pen
Strokes & lines
A stroke is the outline drawn along the edge of a shape or path. Any object can have a fill, a stroke, or both — and a plain straight line is really just a stroke with nothing inside it. This page covers how to add and size a stroke, draw lines, and set caps and joins.
Stroke color and width
Select a shape and open the Properties panel. You'll find two stroke controls side by side:
- A Stroke color swatch — click it to pick a color (or a spot color), or set it to none to turn the outline off.
- A Stroke width field (its tooltip reads Stroke width) — the thickness of the outline, in your document unit.
Set the width to 0 to remove the stroke while keeping the color set. There's a small convenience here: if you re-enable a stroke color on an object whose width is still 0, the width bumps up to 1 automatically so the outline actually shows — otherwise you'd be painting an invisible line.
Tip: units follow your document. To switch between millimeters, points and the rest, right-click the ruler and pick a unit — there's no separate menu for it.
The Line tool
For a straight line, grab the Line tool from the toolbar (shortcut L). Drag on the
canvas from one point to another to draw. Hold Shift while you drag to snap the line to
0°, 45° or 90° — handy for perfectly horizontal, vertical or diagonal rules.
A line has a stroke color and width but no fill and no corner radius — there's no
inside to fill and no corner to round. Everything you do to it happens through the stroke
controls above. After you draw, the tool hands you back to Select (V) so you can
reposition or restyle right away.
End caps and corner joins
Two finer stroke controls decide how the ends and corners of a stroke are drawn. Both live in the Properties panel as dropdowns.
Cap controls how an open end is finished:
| Cap | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flat | The stroke stops exactly at the endpoint (a butt end). |
| Round | A half-circle extends past the endpoint. |
| Square | A square extends half the stroke width past the endpoint. |
Join controls how two stroke segments meet at a corner:
| Join | What it does |
|---|---|
| Miter | Sharp, pointed corners. |
| Round | Rounded corners. |
| Bevel | Flattened, clipped corners. |
Round and Square caps make a line look slightly longer than its geometry, because they extend beyond the endpoints — worth remembering when you're aligning things precisely.
Where caps and joins appear
Here's the important scope note: the Cap and Join dropdowns are surfaced on paths — the freeform shapes you draw with the Pen. Rectangles, ellipses and the plain Line tool expose only the stroke color and width, not cap and join. When you need control over how ends and corners are rendered, draw the artwork as a path with the Pen tool, where those controls are available.
Strokes and print
Strokes are true vectors, so they stay crisp at any size and any print resolution. Two things to keep in mind for print work:
- Don't go too thin. Very fine hairlines can drop out or break up on press. Keep any line you actually want to see comfortably readable rather than trusting a sub-half-point width to survive.
- Spot and overprint. A stroke can carry a spot color and can be set to overprint — useful for die lines, foils and trapping. That behavior is covered in Spot colors & separations.
Note: Popcorn Editor doesn't currently offer a dashed-stroke or dash-pattern control. Strokes are solid.
Where to go next
Ready to draw shapes with custom ends and corners? Head to The Pen tool & editing paths. To choose stroke and fill colors precisely, see Fill, stroke & background color.