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A symbol is a graphic, button, or movie clip that you create in Macromedia Flash MX 2004 or Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004. You create the symbol only once; you can then reuse it throughout your document or in other documents. A symbol can include artwork that you import from another application. Any symbol that you create automatically becomes part of the library for the current document. For more information on the library, see Using the library to manage media assets.
Each symbol has its own Timeline. You can add frames, keyframes, and layers to a symbol Timeline, just as you can to the main Timeline. For more information, see Using the Timeline. If the symbol is a movie clip or a button, you can control the symbol with ActionScript. For more information, see Handling Events.
An instance is a copy of a symbol located on the Stage or nested inside another symbol. An instance can be very different from its symbol in color, size, and function. Editing the symbol updates all of its instances, but applying effects to an instance of a symbol updates only that instance.
Using symbols in your documents dramatically reduces file size; saving several instances of a symbol requires less storage space than saving multiple copies of the contents of the symbol. For example, you can reduce the file size of your documents by converting static graphics, such as background images, into symbols and then reusing them. Using symbols can also speed SWF file playback, because a symbol needs to be downloaded to the Flash Player only once.
You can share symbols among documents as shared library assets during authoring or at runtime. For runtime shared assets, you can link assets in a source document to any number of destination document, without importing the assets into the destination document. For assets shared during authoring, you can update or replace a symbol with any other symbol available on your local network. See Using shared library assets.
If you import library assets that have the same name as assets already in the library, you can resolve naming conflicts without accidentally overwriting existing assets. See Resolving conflicts between library assets.
For an introduction to using symbols and instances, select Help > How Do I > Quick Tasks > Create Symbols and Instances.
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