Corel Draw 10 : Working with Symbols - Adding symbols to a document, Creating your own symbols

In CorelDraw, you can add symbols to your documents from fonts such as Wingdings and Zapf Dingbats. And you can take any graphic that you've created and save it in a symbol collection for later reuse.

1. Adding symbols to a document

There are two ways that a symbol character—or any other text character, such as a number or foreign language character—can be added to a document: embedded within artistic or paragraph text or placed as a separate object. Within text, symbols can be colored and formatted with the same commands used for normal text characters. When placed as objects, symbols can be resized, extruded, and manipulated like any other object.

To add symbols to a document:

1.	Choose Tools > Symbols and Special Characters, choose Window > Dockers > Symbols and Special Characters, or press . The Symbols and Special Characters docker opens (Figure 1). Figure 1. You select fonts, symbol collections, and specific symbols in this docker.
2.	Select a font or symbol collection from the drop-down list.
3.	Scroll down until you find the symbol you want.
4.	To add a symbol to your document as a separate graphic object, click the symbol and drag it onto the document (Figure 2). Figure 2. When placed as objects, you can embellish symbols by adding a drop shadow, a texture, or color, for example. or To add a symbol as text to an existing text string, position the insertion marker within the text string and double-click the symbol in the docker window (Figure 3). Figure 3. You can embed symbols within artistic or paragraph text.

2. Creating your own symbols

You can also create custom symbols and add them to any existing symbol collection or start a new collection of your own.

To create a custom symbol: