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
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.
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.
When pdf with symbol imported and then unusable parts deleted then you cannot see symbols in the Object Manager, but they are included in file (and saved with file). So you can see them on the Symbol Manager and delete as suggested by harryLondon above (purge unused symbols).
Mek