MetaEdit+ will automatically create small icon versions of your Object, Relationship and Role symbols to display in toolbar buttons, menus, lists etc. All elements except property and generator labels will be included, and all conditions will be treated as true. If there is no symbol, or if the only elements in the symbol are texts that would be too small after scaling to the size of the icon, MetaEdit+ will build toolbar buttons with an abbreviated form of the type name.

To override the automatically created icons for Object, Relationship and Role symbols, or to specify icons for Graph and Port types (which have no symbols), you can define a specific icon with the Icon Editor. As there are different sizes of icons used in the toolbar and lists, and between different platforms, the icon is defined as a vector graphic. You can of course use a bitmap as the sole element of the icon, although scaling to different sizes may then not be ideal.

The Icon Editor (shown in Figure 3–26) is thus a vector graphics editor, effectively a subset of the Symbol Editor described in Sections 3.1–3.3. There are no connectables, no property or generator labels, and no conditions.