Sharing Layouts

The Cloud Layouts feature is a useful way to share and back up your layouts. But sometimes you may need to manually share your layout with someone else, such a subcontractor that you don't want to add to your organizational account. In that case, you will need to save and share two files. We'll look at that process in this section.

Layout Files - Two Per Layout

Each layout is made of two files. The file most people think about is the template file which contains the margins, styles, fonts, etc. to be used in the layout. This file is usually prepared in MS Word, but it can also be viewed and edited in ASD by selecting the layout and clicking [Edit Document Template]. But there is also a file in the JSON format that contains all the settings for your Speakers, Parentheticals, Q&A, Colloquy, etc.. These are the setting you view when you click the [Edit Layout] button. BOTH FILES are needed by anyone whom you want to use your layout.

Where Are They?

The easiest way to find the files is to go to the File tab in ASD and click the [Open Logs] button. This opens a file explorer window to the Logs folder of ASD. You can click the up arrow icon once to go up to the AutoScript Desktop folder. (Alternatively you can click the AutoScript Desktop portion in the address bar.) From the AutoScript Desktop folder, you will see a "layouts" folder. Open that folder. You will see two files for each layout. One ending in ".docx" and one ending in ".json". (Some windows users have their view set to hide file extensions, so you may not see them. But you should still be able to see both files.)

Both of these files must be copied and provided to the user with whom you wish to share your layout. They will paste these files into their layouts folder and restart ASD. Once restarted, they should be able to use the newly added layout.

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