A stroked path is a centerline whose visible shape is defined by a stroke width, cap style, and join style — rather than by a filled outline. Strokes are a design-time tool: the font formats have no representation for stroked paths, so they are always expanded into envelope contours when the font is exported. Inside the glyph editor, in the FontCreator project file, and in the .glyphs format, the stroke is kept in its centerline-plus-attributes form so it can be re-edited.

Decompose Stroke

Decompose Stroke permanently expands the selected stroked paths into the envelope contours that describe their visible shape. The centerlines and stroke attributes are replaced by the resulting outlines.

The font exporter performs the same expansion automatically, so this command is needed only when the authored geometry itself should reflect the post-expansion shape — for example to apply further outline operations like overlap removal or to hand the glyph off to a tool that does not understand stroked paths.

Available from Glyph → Decompose → Stroke in the main menu, and from the right-click context menu in the glyph editor near the Stroke toggle.