Retaining Slices Made Within a Symbol in Fireworks

Question

I've been working with FW for a little while now, and I've come to using symbols for sections of a site in my designs. Mostly things like a header or a footer and the occasional sidebar.

These parts of the site don't change very often so to make things a bit more modular I make them symbols and edit them if needed and the changes are global for those items.

One of the things I am trying to achieve here is to be able to make the slices I'll need for like the navigation or the cart icon of a e-commerce store.

While I can do it easily, I'd like it to be within the symbol (I have made slices within a symbol but it doesn't seem to carry over into the common library symbol) that way I can keep it in my common library to basically put together the pieces of a page that I know will be there and have the slices already made if I need to make a new page for my layout on a website.

I'm curious if someone has this same problem and looking for the same answer as me or even a work around. I think this would greatly increase anyone's workflow when designing a website that they want to show to a client as a prototype.

Answer 1

Assuming that by slices you mean the 9-slice scaling feature of a symbol, it does apply to common library symbols. I use it quite often.

If you have problems with your image, you'll have to be more specific on how exactly this "doesn't seem to carry over".

In case you mean the slices inside a web-layer that are used for export, the same thing, they work as expected, independantly of type of graphics (symbols, autoshapes, vector, bitmap). You will have to provide more information demonstrating your issue.

Note:

Fireworks up to current CS6 version, contains a bug that makes vector shapes (incl. auto-shapes, most common library symbols, etc) inside 9-slice scaled symbol a bit blurry when resized. To workarond this bug and make my designs pixel-perfect I flatten everything inside a symbol, while retaining editable layers in a different hidden folder for future. Like this:

Look at the a comparison of the results:

As you can see in the above image, a common library symbol is scaled using 9-slice properly.