Adobe Edge Preview 5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Working Smart with Symbols

There’s one trait that animators, web builders, and programmers all share. They hate to do the same job more than once. In each of these crafts, there are tools and techniques that help you minimize the grunt work and maximize the time available for creativity. In Edge, symbols work that way. You build an element once, and then you can use it many times. Symbols make your web page more efficient, too. If you’re building a scene with a couple hundred raindrops, all you need is one definition of a raindrop in order to fill the sky with them. You can even change the size, rotation, and opacity of the individual instances to add variety to your scene.

This chapter gives you all the details about creating, using, and editing symbols. You’ll also learn some tricks for working with Edge’s Library panel—the storage barn for symbols and other project assets.

About Symbols

Copying and pasting is the most obvious way to reuse something you’ve created, but while that time-honored technique saves time, it doesn’t save space. Say, for example, you need to show a swarm of cockroaches in the Edge advertisement you’re creating for New and Improved Roach-B-Gone. You draw a single cockroach and then copy and paste it 100 times. Congratulations: You’ve got yourself 101 cockroaches… and one big, slow page download.

Instead, you should take that first cockroach and save it in Edge as a symbol. Symbols give you a way to reuse your work and keep your animation’s finished ...