: Removing a section of a stroked path in Illustrator I'm creating a shield and have used a few shapes with multiple strokes. See pic below. I'm not sure how to get rid of the indicated part

@Murphy569

The only way I can think of to do this while maintaining the outer shield as a stroked path would be with clipping masks, but unless maintaining strokes is a requirement, I believe using masks would be more complicated than necessary.

If it is required to maintain the outer shield's stroke as a stroke, then this answer won't help you.

Personally, I would convert that outer shield's stroke to a compound path with a fill. You should be able to accomplish this by selecting the outer shield, and then going to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. That should create a group containing the fill as its own path, and what was previously the stroke as another path. You'll need to Object > Ungroup (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+G) those objects so they are each individually selectable before proceeding.

Once this is done, I think you should be able to just use Minus Front from the Pathfinder panel. Do this by following these steps:

First draw a path between your top and bottom horizontal black bars:


Then select both that path, and your outer shield path, and click the Minus Front button from the Pathfinder panel:


Then you'll have the gap you wanted:


Repeat those last couple steps on the other side, and I think you'll be done.

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@Pierce403

I think every stroke applied from separate shape, so you can simply give "Bring forward" instead of break the stroke.

Then the output come like this, I hope you expect like this one.

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@Ogunnowo857

There are plenty of ways of doing this. One is to add anchors to create the segment you want to remove, then delete that segment.


Using the pen tool (P) click on the stroke to add a two new anchors to the path: one at the beginning of the segment you want to remove and one at the end. You have to click on the path guideline, which is in the middle of the stroke.
Using the direct select tool (A), click on the segment you want to delete. It might help to click first on an empty area of the artboard so everything is deselected and then click on the segment.
Press the Delete key to delete that segment. The shape will be now open, missing that one section.




Mind you, as you can see in my simplified image, the ends of the stroke will be perpendicular to the stroke as opposed to horizontal. I don't know if this will affect your design or not. There is a way of fixing this, but I will keep it simple for now (tend to write treatises).

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