To open the Symbol Editor, press the Symbol button in the corresponding Object, Relationship, or Role Tool (in the Port Tool, the Symbol button is disabled as Ports do not have their own symbols). You can also open the Symbol Editor for a type from almost any place where that type is displayed in a list, by selecting Edit Symbol from the type’s pop-up menu. In a Graph Tool’s Types tab and Bindings tab, and in the Diagram Editor sidebar in the tree view or the top row of the property sheet, Shift-double-clicking the type will also work.

As a result of any of the above, a Symbol Editor opens showing the symbol of that type as in Figure 3–1 (if no symbol has yet been defined for the type, the editor will initially be empty).

The Symbol Editor window can be divided into seven parts. The usual menu bar can be found from the top of the window. Below the menu bar, there is a toolbar with action buttons (see Section 3.1.1) for Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Align to Grid, Scroll and Zoom commands (Set Zoom, Default Zoom and Zoom to Fit), as well as the tool buttons for creating various symbol element shapes (see Section 3.2). The largest part of the window, the drawing area that contains the symbol elements, lies in the middle. On its left side there is a side bar that contains a tree view of all this symbol’s elements, and a property sheet showing the formatting of the currently selected element. At the bottom of the window, there is a formatting bar for symbol element properties like color, line style and weight, and a status bar showing information about the currently selected elements and grid and zoom settings. When certain tool modes are active (like when editing a template layout), the status bar may provide additional tool info and a link to the tool’s documentation.