Symbols in CC3+ comes with a lot of advanced functionality beyond simply placing down an icon in your map. One of of the entries on that list is symbol attributes.

Symbol attributes are text entities that are embedded into the symbol, but allow the user to set their value when placing the symbol. This allows a single symbol to have a kind of dynamic content. this can be used for many purposes; one of the more common one is for scale bars. By default, most scale bars in CC3+ are designed to be 100 miles or feet long. But instead of hard-coding the number 100 in the symbol, the scale bars use attributes, so if you need a shorter scale bar, you can just place it at 0.5 scale and type 50 as the attribute value. This means you only need to define a single symbol, and it can be used for multiple scales, instead of having a small fixed set with common values. The text you enter becomes part of the symbol, so it will follow along if you move the symbol around.

Other uses for attributes are placeable signs with user-defined text, modern military unit counters with identification text, and much more.

You’ve probably already used this functionality, but if you want to test it, simply start a new map in the CC3 standard overland style. Once you have created the map, hit the Symbols in Map button, pick the scale bar and place it in the map. You’ll notice that each time you place it, you are prompted for the Scale. As mentioned above, the idea here is that you can supply the right value if you have scaled your scale bar to make it larger or smaller, for example 50 is you are placing the symbol at .5 scale, or 400 if you are placing it at scale 4.

So, how to make such symbols?

It is actually pretty simple, let us demonstrate by creating a NATO APP-6D unit counter for use on tactical maps. I won’t delve into all the details of such counters, but I’ll just recreate the infantry counter from the sample image of the top of the wiki page. This counter is a simple box with a cross, but it has 3 variable text entries, the size indicator on top, the unit designation on the left, and the force it belongs to on the right.

To keep this tutorial to the point, I am skipping everything about scaling the symbol properly or putting it into a symbol catalog. There are multiple articles on those aspects already. You should familiarize yourself with those topics if you plan on making a full set of these counters.

(1) Start by drawing the base symbol. You can do this using the basic line tool. Make sure to use a solid fill style, and set a reasonable line width (experiment)

(2) Place some text in the map near the symbol. Use Change Properties on it to change the text properties like height and font to something that looks reasonable next to the symbols. Once you are happy with the look of the text, use Extract Properties on the baseline of the text to grab whatever properties that entity have and make them the active properties for new entities. Erase this text when done

(3) Click Text Specs and set Justify to Below Center. The justification point controls the direction the text will grow, which is very important here, because we don’t know the exact length of the text the end user of the symbol will use.

(4) Pick Define Attribute from the Symbols menu. In the Text Attribute dialog that appears, Set tag text to XX, Prompt text to Unit Size and Default value to XX.

(5) Hit OK in the dialog, and now place the insertion point in the exact center of the topmost line of our symbol. After placing it, the sample text should be shown.

(6) We have two more text attributes to place, this is basically repeating steps 3, 4 and 5 two more times. The only difference is that for the text to the left of the symbol, Justify should be set to Below Far Right and the insertion point should be placed in the bottom left corner of the symbol, and for the text to the right, set Justifiy to Below Far Left and place the insertion point in the bottom right corner of our symbol. You should end up with an illustration looking like this.

(7) All that remains is to define the symbol, using Define Symbol from the Symbols menu. When defining the symbol, make sure to select all parts of the symbol, including the 3 text attributes we defined. Then just give the symbol a nice name, and hit OK in the define symbol dialog.

(8) Once defined, the symbol will disappear from the drawing area, but it will appear in the symbol catalog window. Just hit the Symbols in Map button to show the symbols in the map instead of the ones from the loaded symbol catalog. Note that if symbols in map is already enabled, just toggle it off and back on again to refresh the view and you should see your new symbol.

(9) Now try to place the symbol in the map. Every time you place it, a dialog will pop up, allowing you to set the properties for that specific symbol instance.

Now you can place all your tokens to indicate the positions of your units. If you need to change a text attribute after placing the symbol, you can use Numeric Edit on it.

There are lots of different use cases for these attributes. Unit counters and scale bars are just a few examples. Some map styles have symbols that are just made of an attribute and nothing else, because that lets you place text in the map where the formatting is preset by the symbol. You could make houses with a text attribute in the middle of it for placing the house number, like seen on some modern maps, or you can make planet symbols with labels.

And while we made a very simple vector symbol here, these can also be used along with raster symbols. Since raster symbols are usually created a bit differently, the way to add text attributes to them is usually to first import the images as symbols, then from the symbol manager, select the appropriate symbol and hit the edit button. Define the editing window as requested, and now, with the symbol edit window open, you can just place a text attribute directly inside it by using Symbols -> Define Attribute the way we did it above. No need to define the symbols anew when you are editing an existing one, just close the window when done and confirm that you want to save the changes to the symbol.

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