Folio Writer
Sharing on the Folio Cloud
community
The community section of Folio Cloud is a gallery of projects other writers have chosen to share: thesis templates, grant-proposal skeletons, tutorials, course material, finished documents to read. Anything you publish there is a copy; the project you keep working on stays private and yours.
What people share
Templates are the obvious case — a dissertation skeleton with the front matter, chapter folders and a bibliography in place, or a proposal laid out to an agency's sections — but the gallery is for anything another writer can open and learn from: a tutorial written as a project, a course reader, a lab protocol, a paper with its figures and references as a worked example. Each entry has a category (Thesis / Dissertation, Journal article, Grant proposal, Lab notebook / Protocol, Book / Monograph, Course / Teaching, Report / Whitepaper, Notes / Other), tags, and a short description, and the gallery is searchable across all of them.
Three ways to open a shared project
When you submit, you choose how the published copy opens for others:
Live edit — the copy is a live, collaborative sandbox: anyone with the link edits the same document in real time. Right for a tutorial people work through, a shared scratch space, or a template meant to be filled in on the spot. (It is a shared copy, so expect it to change.)
Read-only — the copy opens as a reader: the rendered manuscript, no editor. Readers can clone it into their own account as a fresh private project, or download it as a .folio, and work from there. This is the mode for templates.
View only — read-only and sealed: no clone, no download. For a document you want read but not copied — a draft under review, course material you keep current yourself.
Download and clone can also be switched individually, so a read-only tutorial can allow cloning but not downloading, and so on.
Publishing
- Open the project in Folio Cloud, signed in — the project must be saved to your account, since publishing is an account action.
- Choose Submit to community, pick the category, add tags and a description, and set the mode and the clone/download switches.
- A moderator reviews the submission (the review opens it read-only). On approval a frozen copy is published to the gallery; your original is untouched and stays private, so you can keep editing it without the shared copy changing.
To publish a new version later, submit again; the gallery shows how often an entry has been cloned.
What can't be shared this way
An end-to-end encrypted project can't be submitted — the published copy would be unreadable to everyone, moderators included. Make an unencrypted copy of what you want to share and submit that. Projects with other people's unpublished work, or anything you don't hold the rights to, don't belong in the gallery either; the review is there to keep it useful.
Sharing privately instead
The gallery is for public sharing. For a co-author or a reviewer, use the project's own share links — an edit link for live co-writing, a view link for read-only access, optionally behind a password — which never list the project anywhere. See collaboration on Folio Cloud.