Eyedropper Tool Not Picking Up Strokes

[Laurie S]

I pressed some combination of keys which broke my eyedropper tool. Now it refuses to pick up strokes (but can pick up fills just fine).

I restarted Illustrator, but that didn't fix it. I wasn't paying close attention when the switch occurred, but it may have been some combo of <, >, /, [, ], or shift. Any ideas what hotkey combination I pressed and/or how to fix it?

Here are my current settings:

[Monika Gause]

turn on appearance in both columns

[Kurt Gold]

Well, the Appearance checkbox in the Eyedropper Options dialog is always turned off as soon as you expand its section. And always turned on when retracted. In fact, that Appearance checkbox is a misleading expander of the entire section. What matters are the options below the main Appearance entry.

Laurie, you may want to share this sample Illustrator file. It's not quite obvious why you get the blue colour when using the eyedropper on the yellow stroked path.

[Laurie S]

This occurred in a cloud file, so I duplicated it to save locally so I could share. When I did this, unfortunately (or fortunately?) the problem went away. I returned to the original cloud file which still behaves in odd ways:

• Picks up stroke color and applies as fill
• Picks up an object's layer color (blue, red, etc)
• Picks up colors within a gradient (not the gradient itself)

The eyedropper tool has worked perfectly fine in new documents (cloud and local), so I guess I will just delete the file and let this one remain a mystery.