Hi Michael

>I'm thinking of calling it something like "Generate outlines", and when enabled it would make an extra set of curves on separate kind of grouping (grouped either as an actual group or layer or separate color or lineweight or maybe any of these) that would be coincident with the regular edges. So that would mean that the outline curves would stack up on the "regular edges".

Great!


>I think you'll want the outline to go underneath all the other regular edges and I guess underneath the shaded image as well so that when it's thickened it only adds thickness to only one side of the shape rather than having thickness on both sides.

Having the outline on a seperate layer would give complete freedom in this regard.


>I don't believe that there is any way in PostScript to add thickness to just one side of a path rather than having the thickness be symmetrical around the path center line.

Will the outline path be a closed curve? I hope so because for a closed path there's an Align Stroke option in Illustrator that allows to set the stroke any way we want.



Then the other thing is that if you have separate multiple objects... Then I'd think that the outlines would go like this... Does that seem right?

Yes please, individual, seperate objects should have their own outline.