I do beer signs for a living. Sometimes I like to import other coreldraw files into my current work to take designs off of them, such as a curve or a portion of text. I then delete the unused parts. The problem is that whenever I do this, it makes the save file huge!
You can test this. Open an empty coreldraw file. Drag a few .cdr's into it. Delete everything you imported. Save the empty file. It will be the size of all those .cdr's combined!
Is this a bug or something I can fix?
You could also drag this to your toolbar.
It takes the selected objects and creates a new document from them.
Thanks for solving this mystery guys, and for the solution to mitigate it. I never even knew about these "symbols", and this has been bugging me for a year lol
Is there a way to stop these symbols from ever being saved with a file? An option?
Man these symbols had leeched themselves onto tons of files. My disk space taken up by signs is going to be reduced by like 60% after I'm done Saving As - Selected Only. I can't thank you guys enough.
I think the symbol must have already been in the file that you imported. You are unlikely to have created a symbol by accident.
The way to stop symbols from being saved with the file is to delete them before saving :
The above is the instruction from the help file of X4 so check the X5 help if you see something different on screen.
What must have happened is that I imported some older files with symbols in them from .pdf documents. Since I do a lot of importing, eventually a great deal of .cdrs had these hidden symbols in them. I'm going through now and removing them all from every file I've ever made that's a big file size.
As far as I'm aware, the symbol manager is a CorelDraw-speciific feature.
I don't think PDF would have a way to store a symbol separately from the print stream and importing the PDF would at most create a series of printable objects -- it would not actually add a symbol to the symbol manager.
Those symbols may have come from an imported CDR file (perhaps, one that a customer gave you) but I don't think they would have come from a PDF.
They 100% did. MillerCoors used to send us graphics in .pdf form. All of these symbols are from that time. If I import one of these .pdf files, it creates a symbol. Something in the conversion I guess. That's how all the symbols got created without my knowledge or even knowing about the Symbol Manager.