I have Animate (standard) and according to the manual (p119) I should be able to turn strokes to pencil lines - that is the invisible kind not the brush kind.
I can’t find this option anywhere and the shift F12 shortcut doesn’t seem to do anything. Is this a bug?
This feature would be very handy as I mostly work without lines in other apps but occasionally need the odd line matching to the shape to make an object stand out from the background.
I have also tried drawing with a pencil, filling the shape and then setting the pencil line to 0 - this still leaves me with a pencil line strangely enough though I can change the line thickness later.
Anyone have any hints or tips as to drawing / animating without lines in animate?
Hmm, for me I have this on page 149 of the user guide.
In any case, this command works just fine for me here. I draw an invisible stroke with the stroke tool, then I select it with the select tool. I right-click in the drawing view, and from the right-click menu go to Convert > Stroke to pencil line, and I get a pencil line. I also tried the shortcut, Shift-F12, and that worked for me too, both from the drawing view and the camera view.
Try going to your preferences, Edit > Preferences, and restore default shortcuts. Perhaps that shortcut was overwritten by mistake. You could also locate the shortcut in the Preferences, in the Shortcuts tab, under Drawing Mode, called Convert Strokes to Pencil Lines. There you could set the shortcut to something else, then double-check to see whether for some reason the shortcut itself is broken.
With pencil lines, you can always change the thickness of a line at any time - this is the purpose of using a pencil line. You can have a pencil line with a line thickness of 0.
Hi LillyV
Thanks for the reply. None of that seems to work for me. I don’t get any option in the dropdown to convert strokes to pencil lines. 
I have reset all the shortcuts.
Are you using Pro? p149 for me is about the colour picker.
If I draw a line with size 0 I can not increase the size later
If i draw at a biiger size I can reduce it to 0 but I have found that that renders if I have a colour card underneath it.
Let me make sure that I test this on the same version as you. Can you tell me exactly what build number you’re using? Go to Help > About and read off the numbers there, should be something like 7.x.x.xxxx
Hi
I only recently bought and downloded.
Toon Boom Animate
V 7.6.0 (4830) (2008-10-03 13.39:05)
Okay I think I’ve figured it out. If you draw with the pencil line set to 0, then it creates a transparent stroke. Then, if you select this stroke, and in the drawing view, right-click and go Convert > Stroke to Pencil Line, this doesn’t seem to work. If you create a line with the pencil set to something other than zero, then you try to set it to zero, you get one pixel width worth of a stroke, so there is still some thickness there.
I contacted Toon Boom R&D and this problem regarding the convert stroke to pencil line has been fixed and will be available in the next release of Animate. The issue about the pencil line with thickess of zero still showing a thin line will be further investigated by the team.
For the moment, the only thing that I can recommend is to work with the pencil set to 0 if you want transparent lines, and work with the pencil set to a non-zero value if you know you don’t want that line to be transparent.
thanks for that.
I still don’t get an option to convert stroke to pencil line. The option just doesn’t appear in any of the menus or drop downs. I get convert brush stroke to pencil line and vice versa but not convert stroke to pencil line.
Is the update going to be a patch or paid for update and is it going to be any time soon?
There is a paid upgrade on the way. The exact release date hasn’t been decided yet, but it should be sometime in the next three months.