I was idling thinking how one might go about this, when I came up with a very simple solution. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is what Illustrator does. Looking at the diagrams, it would seem that way.
My initial plan was to figure out some sort of decoration that would "shift" a path to the left or right, but that just seemed fraught with difficulties. But I couldn't think of a way to get TikZ to treat the two halves of a path in a different manner. Then I realised that there is such a way: clipping.
When TikZ clips against a path then the two sides of that path are treated in a different manner. So that can be used to get it to only draw one side. Sort of. You draw a path, but clip it against itself. Since the clipping path has no width, this means that half the path gets drawn. The "Sort of" is because the decision about which half depends on the region that is being enclosed, not the actual side of the path. This, I think, leads to the funny look on the Illustrator images in the question.
A general solution to this would involve a command to draw and clip in the same breath. That could be done with my spath library (still in development, but available from the TeX-SX site on launchpad), and one would have to use the "reverse" clip method from somewhere around here for dealing with the other side. But to demonstrate the concept, we can just do it by hand. Here's the cube:
and here's the code:
\documentclass{article}
%\url{http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/29991/86}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=5,line width=2mm]
\draw (0,0,0) -- (1,0,0) -- (1,1,0) -- (0,1,0) -- cycle;
\draw (1,0,0) -- (1,0,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\draw (0,1,0) -- (0,1,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\begin{scope}[yshift=-2cm,line width=4mm]
\begin{scope}
\clip (0,0,0) -- (1,0,0) -- (1,1,0) -- (0,1,0) -- cycle;
\draw (0,0,0) -- (1,0,0) -- (1,1,0) -- (0,1,0) -- cycle;
\end{scope}
\begin{scope}
\clip (1,0,0) -- (1,0,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\draw (1,0,0) -- (1,0,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\end{scope}
\begin{scope}
\clip (0,1,0) -- (0,1,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\draw (0,1,0) -- (0,1,-1) -- (1,1,-1) -- (1,1,0) -- cycle;
\end{scope}
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
Note the scopes to limit the clips, and the doubled line width, since we lose half of it in the clip.
Best Answer
While there is the
scopesTikZ library which allows you to use in-path scopes, many of the drawing options are global to the drawing path. Things like color, thickness and drawing pattern (e.g. solid vs. dashes) can only be applied to the whole path. The reason for this comes from the underlying graphic system (PS or PDF) and PGF/TikZ can't do much about it.If you want to draw lines with different settings you will have to do so with two or more drawing commands. Note that TikZ has the ability to draw material into the background, i.e. behind previous drawn material. Enclose such commands between
\begin{pgfonlayer}{background}...\end{pgfonlayer}.