So right now I have a workflow that involves making a lot of complex appearance stacks, saving them as a Graphic Style, then later bringing them into another file by hitting the 'library' button in the Graphic Styles palette and navigating to it via the Other Library file picker.

If I import a style that uses a brush or a global color swatch or a pattern swatch or a width profile, those assets will get imported. But a style that uses a symbol won't import the symbol, and this is a really annoying little exception. It is, perhaps, not surprising that this exception exists since none of Illustrator's native effects use symbols.

But lately I have been doing a lot of stuff with Astute Graphics' Halftone and Stipple effects. Both of these live effects have modes where they can spray symbols across a fill or a stroke based on the underlying art. They can even mix multiple symbols across the art. They're pretty powerful and a lot of fun.

I use these effects in complex Appearance stacks, and save these stacks as Graphic Styles so I can access them quickly with one click. Everything works fine up to this point as long as I'm in the same document.

But when I open a new document and want to bring those styles over, I hit the library button in the Styles palette and load in the file with the styles... and the styles come over without the symbols they rely on. I have to open the same file as a library in the Symbol palette and import all the symbols, then convince the Styles palette to regenerate all its thumbnails.

(If I copy and paste a path with one of these styles from one file to another, it does bring across the symbols. But then I run into problems where some of the other effects I use get expanded into bitmaps when they travel through the copy buffer.)

The nice folks at Astute tell me there's no way for their effect plugins to tell Illustrator that these symbols are associated with a Graphic Style, so that they would be automatically imported when I import a style. Please give them a way to do this. Thanks.

Attached: a file with one Graphic Style that uses some symbols via Astute's Stipplism plugin.