When colours are first selected for a design, they will all have a unique symbol assigned at random for the chart.
The change symbols command gives the user total freedom to assign any symbol to each colour. The symbols can be taken from the provided cross stitch fonts or from any TrueType font on your system. All symbols must be from the same font.
There is a special button that assigns symbols automatically. This is done by colour brightness such that dark colours will get dark symbols. This gives a clearer chart when printing symbol charts since the picture appears in a similar way to newsprint.
Note that Cross Stitch Professional uses TrueType fonts fore its symbols in order to gain quality when scaling printouts. A TrueType font will give smooth edges regardless of the print size whereas bitmaps drawn with the program would produce poor quality when scaling. For this reason, the program does not allow creation of new symbols. If custom fonts are required, there are shareware programs for creating TrueType fonts which are very inexpensive.