Working with symbols, About symbols – Adobe Flash Professional CC 2014 v.13.0 User Manual
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Working with symbols
About symbols
Create symbols
Convert animation on the Stage into a movie clip symbol
Duplicate symbols
Edit symbols
About symbols
A symbol is a graphic, button, or movie clip that you create once in the Flash Professional authoring environment or by using the SimpleButton
(AS 3.0) and MovieClip classes. You can then reuse the symbol throughout your document or in other documents.
A symbol can include artwork that you import from another application. Any symbol that you create automatically becomes part of the library for the
current document.
An instance is a copy of a symbol located on the Stage or nested inside another symbol. An instance can be different from its parent symbol in
color, size, and function. Editing the symbol updates all of its instances, but applying effects to an instance of a symbol updates only that instance.
Using symbols in your documents dramatically reduces file size; saving several instances of a symbol requires less storage space than saving
multiple copies of the contents of the symbol. For example, you can reduce the file size of your documents by converting static graphics, such as
background images, into symbols and then reusing them. Using symbols can also speed SWF file playback, because a symbol needs to be
downloaded to Flash® Player only once.
Share symbols among documents as shared library assets during authoring or at runtime. For runtime shared assets, you can link assets in a
source document to any number of destination documents, without importing the assets into the destination document. For assets shared during
authoring, you can update or replace a symbol with any other symbol available on your local network.
If you import library assets with the same name as assets already in the library, you can resolve naming conflicts without accidentally overwriting
existing assets.
Additional introductory instruction about symbols is available from these resources:
Adobe TV:
Adobe Video Workshop:
video focuses on Flash Professional CS3, but the
information is still relevant.)
Flash Professional Design Center article:
Types of symbols
Each symbol has a unique Timeline and Stage, complete with layers. You can add frames, keyframes, and layers to a symbol Timeline, just as you
can to the main Timeline. When you create a symbol you choose the symbol type.
Use graphic symbols
for static images and to create reusable pieces of animation that are tied to the main Timeline. Graphic symbols
operate in sync with the main Timeline. Interactive controls and sounds won’t work in a graphic symbol’s animation sequence. Graphic
symbols add less to the FLA file size than buttons or movie clips because they have no timeline.
Use button symbols
to create interactive buttons that respond to mouse clicks, rollovers, or other actions. You define the graphics
associated with various button states, and then assign actions to a button instance. For more information, see Handling events in
the ActionScript 3.0 Developer’s Guide.
Use movie clip symbols
to create reusable pieces of animation. Movie clips have their own multiframe Timeline that is independent from
the main Timeline—think of them as nested inside a main Timeline that can contain interactive controls, sounds, and even other movie clip
instances. You can also place movie clip instances inside the Timeline of a button symbol to create animated buttons. In addition, movie clips
are scriptable with ActionScript®.
Use font symbols to export a font and use it in other Flash Professional documents.
Flash Professional provides built-in components, movie clips with defined parameters, that you can use to add user interface elements, such
as buttons, checkboxes, or scroll bars, to your documents. For more information, see About Components in
or
Using ActionScript 3.0 Components.
Note: To preview animation in component instances and scaling of 9-slice-scaled movie clips in the Flash Professional authoring
environment, select Control > Enable Live Preview.
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