- [Instructor] In this movie,
we'll discuss a caveat associated with dynamic symbols,
and that is that they are not backward compatible.
And so more often than not,
I go ahead and save my exercise files to the CS6 format
just to make sure you can open them
in any recent version of the software.
Which means if I was to go up to the File menu
and choose the Save command,
then Illustrator would just go ahead and update my CS6 file
and it would end up expanding these symbols.
And to get a sense for what that looks like,
I'll go up to the Break Link button
up here in the control panel
and click on it.
And what that does is it breaks the link with the symbol
and it ends up creating a group,
as you can see on the far left side of the control panel.
It's actually a group inside a group.
So I'm going to go up to the Object menu
and choose the Ungroup command twice in a row
until I see the words Compound Path,
and that tells me that I now have
two independent compound paths, like so.
Now, that is most definitely not what I wanted,
and that would be a big surprise
if you opened the file later
and found this to be the case.
So what we need to do is undo those changes.
I want to see the words Symbol Dynamic
when I click on this instance.
And notice that dynamic symbols
have a tendency of not really showing you
any kind of bounding box.
You'll just see this cross in the middle.
Unless you have the bounding box turned on.
So if I choose Show Bounding Box,
then I'll see a box, like so.
But either way,
the shape is selected.
And so what I need to do
if I want to maintain these dynamic symbols
is go up to the File menu
and choose Save As,
and then I'll find this file right there,
Dynamic suns,
which I've created in advance.
But I'm just going to go ahead
and save over it.
And then you want to make sure Version
is set to Illustrator CC as by default.
Otherwise all you need to do is go ahead
and click OK in order to create that file.
But bear in mind that older versions of Illustrator,
not just CS6 and earlier,
but also the original Illustrator CC and CC 2014,
will not support this feature.
And so if you try to open this file
inside of those older versions of the software,
then again, Illustrator will break the link
and serve up static path outlines.
And so that is often the price
with working with a new feature.
Dynamic symbols, great as they may be,
are not backward compatible
with anything earlier than the most recent version
of Illustrator CC 2015.