You’ll notice that you can’t select a specific attribute of an object from the artboard—the only place to access this functionality is via the Appearance palette. This makes the Appearance palette infinitely important, but it may make you wonder how an object with a complex appearance will print. After all, how does the printer or export format know to draw these multiple attributes on a single path?

The answer is that Illustrator breaks these complex appearances down into multiple overlapping paths—each path contains a basic appearance. This process, called expanding, doesn’t happen on your artboard—it happens in the print stream or the export stream.

There are times when you may want to manually expand your appearances to access the multiple attributes on the artboard. To do so, choose Object > Expand Appearance. Remember that once you’ve expanded an appearance, you are dealing with a group of multiple objects, not a single object anymore. Each of those individual objects has a basic appearance, and unless you’ve created a graphic style (covered later in this chapter), you have no way to return to the original complex appearance.