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?
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.
These symbols are actually the bitmaps that are in the .pdf, which makes the file very large. I don't see them in the Object Manager.