Adobe Illustrator CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

#91 Working with Symbols and Actions

Symbols are objects that display as instances in a document. A single symbol can be deployed as many instances in an Illustrator document. Each instance can be placed, resized, reshaped, and edited in various ways. But each instance retains essential qualities of the original symbol.

Editing a Symbol in Isolation Mode

When you edit a symbol and exit isolation mode, the changes you make to the symbol are applied to all placed instances of that symbol. So, for example, if you change the color of a symbol, the color changes for all placed instances of that symbol.

Available symbols display in the Symbols panel. The icons at the bottom of the panel define and use the available symbols (Figure 91a). ...