About enhancing the appearance of objectsAppearance attributes are properties that affect the look of an object without altering its underlying structure. Appearance attributes include fills, strokes, transparency, and effects. If you apply an appearance attribute to an object and later edit or remove that attribute, it does not change the underlying object or any other attributes applied to the object. Filters and effects let you quickly change the appearance of vector and bitmap objects in a wide variety of ways, from reshaping an object to texturizing an object's fill. While filters make permanent changes to an object, effects don't change the object's original size, anchor points, and path shape--only the way it looks. Effects are a type of appearance attribute, and can be edited at any time using the Appearance palette. (See Comparing filters and effects and Using the Appearance palette.) A graphic style is a named set of appearance attributes stored in the Graphic Styles palette or in a graphic style library. The Graphic Styles palette lets you store styles with the active document, and apply graphic styles to objects, groups, and layers. This gives you a fast and consistent way to change the look of artwork in a document. If a graphic style is replaced in the Graphic Styles palette (that is, if any appearance attributes that make up the graphic style are changed and the new attributes are saved as that graphic style), all objects with that graphic style applied change to the new appearance. Note: You can apply appearance attributes, graphic styles, filters, and effects to selected objects or you can apply them to a targeted group or layer. (See Targeting layers, groups, and containers.) Expanding objects enables you to divide a single object into multiple objects that make up its appearance. For example, if you expand a simple object, such as a circle with a solid-color fill and a stroke, the fill and the stroke each become a discrete object. If you expand more complex artwork, such as an object with a pattern fill, the pattern is divided into all of the distinct paths that created it. You typically expand an object when you want to modify the appearance attributes and other properties of specific elements within it. |