Symbolism is Everything
Most of you have probably done it countless times. You create a great logo or come up with a technique for creating a shape that’s so good, you use it more than once in your current drawing and make a mental note to use it in others.
You’ll use it again ... if you can find it. And if you find it, you’ll have to figure out how to get it into your current drawing. Most of us end up importing ten times more content than needed, then strip away the unwanted stuff. Or we do some sort of dual-window cut-and-paste maneuver.
When you finally get the component you want, you don’t want to be bothered by it anymore. It’s like searching for a map in an overcrowded glove compartment: It’s such a hassle, you’ll deal with organizing it another time. The same goes for a logo you want to reuse within the same drawing. Once you wrestle with it, the last thing you want is to think about doing it again.
Most often, the only thing that keeps us from organizing critical artwork is the “another time” excuse, which is even less justified when you have CorelDraw on hand. The program comes with tools to help users develop a better system for locating and using assets.
Symbols join the major leagues
Until now, CorelDraw’s Symbol Library has been weak—nothing more than a character chart viewer that shows the status of a symbol’s font. With it, you could more easily find and use a particular Dingbat character. So what.
In version 11, new life has been breathed into the Symbols function, which allows users to create and manage symbols throughout a drawing. It’s like the former Clone tool on steroids.
In the simple tri-fold brochure shown here, a logo was duplicated the old-fashioned way—copy and paste. To make changes, you’d have to go back to the original logo, edit it, then copy and paste it into locations within the document, one by one. But if you make the logo a symbol in Draw 11, you can edit it within the program, and Draw will automatically replace the logo instances with the updated version, eliminating the need to copy and paste. It’s that easy. The only hard part is finding the Symbols feature which is buried in the Edit menu, instead of the Tools menu or under Window/Dockers, where the other dockers are found.
Follow these quick steps to turn a logo into a symbol.
1. Go to Edit/Symbol/Library to open the docker.
2. Select the objects on the page you want to turn into symbols.
3. Drag the objects into the Symbol docker, or right-click, choose Symbol, then New. You can also double-click within the Name and Description columns in the docker to add information about the symbol. In Figure 2, note the following: 1) The selected objects now display Symbol in the status bar, 2) the Symbols Library shows a thumbnail of the symbol, and 3) the library tells how many times the symbol appears in the drawing.
In CorelDraw 11, just about anything that can be selected and dragged by a mouse can be converted to a symbol, including artistic text, groups of objects, powerclips, and bitmap images. The few exceptions are paragraph text, internet objects, print merge fields, placed PDF files, and guidelines. Other elements must first be prepared for the transformation:
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If a bitmap is externally linked, it must be embedded.
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A lens applied to an object must be frozen.
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To turn a blend, contour, extrusion, drop shadow, or other compound objects into a symbol, the control object must first be copied to a static object.
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EPS files can be symbolized if they’re imported using the PS- Interpreted filter, which makes them editable.
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Locked objects must be unlocked.
Working with symbols
Once created, a symbol retains all of its characteristics but is treated as a single entity within Draw. In this regard, it functions much like a powerclip. To make a duplicate of a symbol, just drag it from the Symbols Library. If you need three copies, press Insert three times. The Transformation commands can be used to change the size of the inserted symbols, or to skew or rotate them. However, the symbols remain linked by a common destiny.
That destiny is shaped when you edit the symbol from the Symbol Library or right-click any of the symbols in a drawing. Like a powerclip, you’re taken inside the symbol and permitted to alter any part of it. When you click on Finished Editing This Symbol, you return to the drawing. Notice that every instance of the symbol within the document reflects the edits.
And there’s more
A symbol is much more efficient within the CorelDraw file, as DRAW keeps a record of the most current symbol, rather than all edited versions. In the case of the CorelWorld logo used in these examples, the three images are full-color bitmaps that consume about 5MB each. Converting these to symbols saves more than 11MB of RAM and storage space.
Using symbols, it’s much easier to place works in progress. Prior to symbols, you might be reluctant to place several copies of an element that’s still evolving. You’ll end up dealing with several versions that will become obsolete. The worst-case scenario is that you forget to replace one of the elements, and the job goes to press. By using a symbol, this scenario is no longer a worry. Working with FPOs (For Placement Only) is easier, too. When you want to eliminated FPOs in a document, just delete the symbol.
Do you convert work to suit a different color palette? From four color to two? From press to web? Whatever you currently do to make the conversion can be done more smartly with symbols. For instance, if the brochure in Figure 1 must be printed in two colors instead of four, all we’d have to do is edit the symbol by converting the bitmap to duotone or grayscale. This task is much easier when it only has to be done once to change all the logos in the brochure.
The Symbols Library has one drawback: It only functions within a drawing. Symbols you create in one drawing won’t be usable in others unless you copy them to other drawings. So stay tuned: In Part 2 next month, we’ll explore ways in which you can wield total control over the CorelDraw assets you use in one drawing, in multiple drawings, or across a slew of computers.