Offline Support

While Script Elephant was built as a cloud collaboration platform, we understand that live productions often happen in environments without reliable internet access.

Workflows exist within Script Elephant to allow your team to still enjoy the benefits of collaborating throughout pre-production, and to bring those developed assets with you onto a poorly connected show site.

PDF Views

The core of this workflow is Script Elephant's ability to generate beautiful, client-ready PDF documents. One of our core requirements early in development was to make sure that we could reliably generate industry-standard PDF documents, because we understand how essential they are in live production.

If you are working in an environment with limited internet connectivity, our belief is that PDF documents are the most effective solution.

1. They are easily portable and can be moved from machine to machine (e.g., AirDrop).
2. They have clear last-update times, visible both in the file info and in the cover page.
3. They are stable and render consistently across all devices without requiring special software installation.
4. They can be printed.

In addition, our PDF documents are carefully designed to be highly usable in-show, and have been used this way many times:

• The session agenda is interactive. You can click block names from that page in the PDF to be taken directly to that block's page.
• Each new block creates a fresh page break. This allows you to update or rearrange blocks in your PDF without affecting other blocks.
• Each section avoids page breaks. This helps ensure that your speakers don't encounter an awkward page break in the middle of their sentence.

Both the full script view and run of show view are carefully designed to produce printed PDFs that include everything you need to confidently call your show.

On-Site Updates

While on-site, it's generally necessary to still be able to make updates as new information comes in and the show progresses. We believe there is extreme value in still making these updates in-platform whenever possible, so that:

• Versions do not drift and there is a clear source of truth
• Any other stakeholders viewing your production online can still see your updates
• Your historical copy of the show is still accurate

Partially Offline

Script Elephant is designed to work in very low-bandwidth environments. Our recommendation is that, whenever possible, your on-site script editors still attempt to connect however possible to make updates in-platform. They can then download an updated PDF copy of the script, and distribute that updated PDF amongst the team.

This is a comparable workflow to, for example, using Microsoft Word in an offline context. One editor may need to step away briefly to make changes, and then is able to distribute an updated PDF amongst the fully-offline on-site team.

Fully Offline

If you are in a situation where no internet access is possible, then our recommendation is to arrive to show-site with the latest PDFs saved on your devices. At this point, you're able to use any of a number of PDF processing tools to make as many updates, annotations, text insertions and page deletions to those PDFs as necessary.