If you are working on at project with several files, and in particular if at least some of them are pretty small, and you did not merge them when the project was created – then it may be a nuisance that you cannot export them all into one file for review/proofreading.

However, the fact is that you can! A file necessary for this is created automatically as Studio auto-saves the files you are working on. This means that if you go to

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp

you will see that a .tmp file (with a non-meaningful name like “tmp123A”) is created with the interval set for auto-saving. (You will also see that there are a large number of those – and similar – temp files collected there, eventually taking up a lot of memory space. This is not a good thing, of course: normally, only the last of them is useful for this purpose. But don’t start deleting en masse – some of the temp files are necessary for you to be able to create target files.)

When the files are ready for review, just copy that last .temp file to a location of your choice, rename the file extension to .sdlxliff (and maybe give the file itself a meaningful name). Then you can use it as appropriate: send it to a colleague for reviewing it in Studio, or open it in Studio yourself for exporting for bilingual review. In the latter case, before you can perform any batch tasks at all, you need to (1) save the file, and (2) change its language (in the Files view) to the source language.

In all, this is excellent news, and you can read more about it in Paul Filkin’s blog post, Good bugs… bad bugs!, which includes a video tutorial. Thanks are also due to Yuji Yamamoto for discovering this in the first place.

Note: It has been known to happen (i.e. I and a few other people have noticed) that the AutoSave function suddenly does not work any more (but the temp function described above still does). You can check that by opening the AutoSave folder, located here:

c:\Users\[USERNAME]\Documents\Studio 2015\AutoSave\

and see whether it is updated appropriately. If not, it may help to deactivate the function and then activating it again (it is active by default). You will find it under File > Options > Editor; then look at the AutoSave header at the bottom in the righ-hand pane.

All this will of course be included in the the next edition of the manual.