Keep the following guidelines in mind as you edit compound paths:

• Changes to path attributes (such as stroke and fill) always alter all subpaths in a composite path—it doesn’t matter which selection tool you use, or how many subpaths you select. To preserve the individual stroke and fill attributes of the paths you want to combine, group them instead.

• In a compound path, any effect that is positioned relative to a path’s bounding box—such as a gradient, or an image pasted inside—is actually positioned relative to the bounding box of the entire compound path (that is, the path that encloses all of the subpaths).

• If you make a compound path, then change its properties and release it, using the Release command, the released paths inherit the compound path’s properties; they don’t regain their original properties.

• If your document contains compound paths with many smooth points, some output devices may have problems printing them. If so, simplify or eliminate the compound paths, or convert them to bitmap images using a program such as Adobe Photoshop.

• If you apply a fill to a compound path, holes sometimes don’t appear where you expect them to. For a simple path like a rectangle, the inside, or the area you can fill, is easy to see—it’s the area within the enclosed path. However, with a compound path, InDesign must determine whether the intersections created by a compound path’s subpaths are inside (filled areas) or outside (holes). The direction of each subpath—the order in which its points were created—determines whether the area it defines is inside or outside. If a subpath is filled when you want it to be a hole, or vice versa, reverse the direction of that subpath.

Compound path containing two subpaths with same path directions (left) and opposite path directions (right)