Symbols multiplying in Publisher Designer Persona

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First of all I am a big fan of using symbols for shared elements within a document as so often a request "to simply change something" that occurs throughout a document is "the way of the client"!

They work excellently in Designer, with some well documented usage improvements that I would love to see like symbol swaps etc, but what is happening here is just some strange behaviour that concerns me as I don't know how to best clean it up and I think must occur because of symbols not being native in Publisher.

I started with a clean document and have built up about a 15 symbol library, however the first 11 have chosen to multiply half a dozen times in the palette. As you cannot trace which one in the symbols palette an instance/layer is linked to I don't know if I can delete any or all of the symbols from the palette, or going forward how they behave. If I edit one of the originals the duplicates do not change in the palette … so I will probably delete the duplicates and hope others remain linked (outcome remains to be seen).

So another useful development feature here would be a way to find symbols used in a document and the symbol to which they are linked being highlighted in the symbols palette.

Or a "select/delete unused symbols" palette menu option addition.

Some folk who don't use Designer and lament the loss of Symbols in Publisher note that the behaviour of masters is similar, I do wonder if my use of symbols on master pages may be adding to the confusion?

[Callum]

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Unfortunately this isn't something that has ever been reported before so I'm not sure what might have caused this. I've done some testing using Master pages and symbols but can't seem to recreate this behaviour at all. I would perhaps export the assets so you have a saved copy of them and then delete them one by one to ensure you aren't loosing any work in the process. I notice not all of the assets have duplicated which is odd I would be interested to see if this issue occurs again after this.

Thanks
C

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Yes its odd and unusual behaviour but probably the longest document I've used this Publisher/Designer Persona combo approach on. I did delete all the duplicates after editing a symbol or two which appeared to only bounce back and update the first (I guess originals) in the symbols palette. It may mean I have some disconnected symbols somewhere and will have to keep an eye out but behaviour appeared OK. It occurred in stages, the number of duplicates being added to the palette seemingly every couple of days.

The edited set remains intact today. The only other possibly significant factor was the symbols were defined and created in a 4-5 artboard Designer document first, then opened and converted to spreads in Publisher once the base designs had been approved.

I will keep an eye out for recurrence and report back if I can find any consistency. Thanks