There is no getting around the fact that CC3+ contains a huge number of symbols, especially if you own all the add-ons, symbol sets and annuals, and even more if you have installed some of the available free community made sets, or maybe even imported images you have found yourself as symbols.
We have different ways in how we like to go looking for symbols, but one way some people like is having a kind of symbol book they can flip through. I still have memories of software in the last millennium that often came with such printed books in their box, for example a clipart book showing all the clipart available in the software. These days, such books are not quite as useful, because as computers evolved and became more powerful, they started offering on-screen preview and search features. Still, sometimes flipping through a book, either in physical form, or a pdf on your screen can be nice. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can even keep that book on one screen and work with CC3+ on another.
Now, CC3+ doesn’t come with any such books, neither printed nor digital, but it contains the tools that allow you to make one for yourself.
This feature in CC3+ is called Symbol Lookup Sheets, and the core functionality of this is simply to take the symbols from a symbol catalog, and lay them out in a grid pattern in the drawing. You’ll still need to do some work yourself to make a book out of it, but CC3+ do the most time-consuming part for you, the layout.
Making symbol lookup sheets is basically a 2-step process. First, you need to create a drawing that contains the symbols. This can be done automatically with a simple command. Second step is to get it into the desired format, which means either making a pdf file from it, or simply just printing it. So, let us explore these steps.
Creating the Symbol Drawing
Start by opening the first symbol catalog you wish to make a lookup sheet for. The symbol catalog needs to be opened up in the main drawing window, using File -> Open instead of simply opening it in the symbol catalog window. When you use File -> Open to open a symbol catalog, make sure that you set the files of type to CC3+ FSC Symbol Catalog instead of the CC3+ FCW Drawing which it normally defaults to.
You’ll find all the standard symbol catalogs inside the Symbols folder in the CC3+ data directory
(C:\ProgramData\ProFantasy\CC3Plus if you didn’t change the default during install).
Once the symbol catalog has been opened, you’ll probably find yourself staring at a rather empty green screen, but you can confirm that the symbol catalog is loaded by hitting the Symbols in Map 
button above the symbol catalog window to see the symbols in the current drawing (Which in our case is the loaded symbol catalog).
Now, just go to Symbols -> Create catalog thumbnail file. This will open the dialog where you can specify the layout of the lookup page. Use this to configure the size of the symbols and text on the page, how many columns of symbols you want, and the background/text colors (Note that 15 is white, 0 is black). You’ll probably want to experiment a bit here to find the best values for your needs, making sure you get the symbol size and layout according to your preferences and page size used.
The output file will be a regular map file which you can save wherever you want, make sure to use a new file for each symbol catalog you process, as reusing an existing file will overwrite it, not append to it.
Making the lookup sheet
After making the catalog file, you can open it in CC3+. Note that since you are likely experimenting a bit with the parameters, I recommend starting a second instance of CC3+ to load the new drawing file in. That way, it is very easy to switch back to the window with the symbol catalog and recreate the thumbnails with different parameters, overwriting the existing file, and then just reloading it in the second CC3+ instance. This is much quicker than going back and forth between the files within the same CC3+ instance.
Now, once happy with the general layout, you may wish to do some cleanup. For example, most symbol catalogs contains a few drawing tools at the start, but these won’t have a thumbnail preview, so you may want to remove these. At this point, you may also notice some text overlaps. If it is just a few cases, you may wish to simply manually fix them, but if it is a lot, you’ll probably want to reduce the text size used when exporting the catalog thumbnail file.
Hint: To reduce post-export cleanup, you can edit the actual catalog file before making the thumbnail file. Just use Symbol manager in the CC3+ instance with the catalog file, and remove the drawing tools on top and any other symbols you don’t want to be part of the lookup sheet. For example, maybe you don’t want the varicolor version in the thumbnail file since it do look identical to the non-varicolor anyway. If you do edit the catalog file though, be very sure not to save over the original file so you don’t mess up the symbol catalog. One way to secure yourself here is to simply take a backup of the Symbols directory in the CC3+ data directory before starting, so you can copy the files back. Or at least back up the .fsc files in the subfolders you are working with. Or just copy the files to another location on your drive and work with that copy, leaving the originals safely in place. Also, if you want to create custom symbol catalogs for the thumbnail file, have a look at my previous article – Quick Tip: Rearranging Symbols into Custom Symbol Catalogs.
When you are happy with what you see in the CC3+ window, simply print it. Either print to paper for a nice paper copy, or preferably, print to PDF for a digital copy. The advantage with PDF is that even if you want a paper copy, a PDF is a nice preview of what you get instead of wasting toner on a printout that doesn’t look right, and once you have a correctly-looking PDF, you can simply print that. One typical issue here is pagination when the symbol catalog is spanning multiple pages, you may need to do some manual work here. You may also need to experiment a bit with the printer setting to find the right scale to print depending on printer margins and such. Admittedly, this is probably the most finicky part of the process, as CC3+ isn’t a word processor or desktop publishing software, the print function is designed to print drawings, not document-like printouts. To make it easier on yourself, it is sometimes easier to use sheets in CC3+ and set up one sheet per page. For my A4-Sized printouts, I can get 8 by 11 symbols on each page, so by making the 11 first rows one sheet, the next 11 another sheet and so on, I can show the sheets one by one and print it without having to deal with issues like getting the tiling right.
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