How to Remove Stroke while Resizing Object to Appear the Same - Illustrator

Question

I have an object in Illustrator that has both a Stroke and a Fill of the same colour. I would like to remove the Stroke and resize (or otherwise alter) the object so the Fill matches what the object looked like before.

I thought it would be possible to do so by hand, using a duplicate of the object as reference. This, however, seems to alter the curves of the shape somewhat.

My Google-fu has failed me in finding an answer to this question, though it's possible I was searching for the wrong terms. "Resize object by size of stroke", "Convert Stroke to Shape", "Convert Shape to Outline", and "How to remove stroke and resize object to the same size" all failed me.

Answer 1

• Select the object
• Choose Object > Expand Appearance (If it is available. If it is not, ignore this step)
• Choose Object > Expand (you should be able to just click OK unless there's a gradient applied - in that case you may want to remove gradients before doing all this. You can always reapply a gradient after the operation is done.)
• Click the Unite button on the Pathfinder Panel (Window > Pathfinder)

What this does.... expands the stroke so it is a shape rather than a stroked path. Then the Pathfinder operation combines the shape of the stroke with the shape of the fill, making it all 1 object.

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Just as an FYI... rather than the Pathfinder operation you could select both shapes then merely use the Shape Builder Tool to drag across both of them. This will also combine the two shapes to a single shape.