So far, I haven't found any questions like mine, so here goes.
If I have some layers that I would like to present in different ways (e.g., tall vs. wide, clipped views, with/without other layers included, etc.), is there a way to get two or more artboards to "share" them? A web-design analogy would be multiple pages having common elements such as headers, footers, sidebars, etc.
The main thing I like about the artboard approach (as implemented in AD, anyway) is that I can easily set up (and save) the dimensions of an exported image based on the artboard's size and position relative to the layers.
If this can't be done with artboards, is there some other way (that can be saved to the project)? The closest I can think of to making this happen is by creating a separate .afdesign file and then using the Place tool to embed that file into each artboard. I'd rather not have to do all that, though. It would be nice if I could add "links" under each artboard to the original layers, all within the same project. (A Unix analogy might be soft-linking, or better yet, imagine labels in Gmail as opposed to the older folders paradigm. The files/emails can show up in more than one place.)
Another way is to duplicate the layers into each artboard, of course, but that would be clunky. I'd rather have just one set of layers to work on and have each artboard reflect the same changes in real-time--all in the same project.
To be clear, I was experimenting with creating tall and wide images from the same layers by overlapping the artboards. That would be fairly intuitive, and it almost looks like it would work. But of course, the Layers studio clearly shows that the layers only show up on one artboard at a time. If I could somehow get the same layers to be parented by more than one artboard, that should theoretically do the trick.
Altogether, this is simultaneously a question asking if I should do this a different way and also a potential feature request (maybe). :-)
P.S. I'm still new to AD. I'm more of a programmer (and probably sound like it, too) than a designer, so I have no idea what artboards are supposed to be or look like, according to other software such as Illustrator. I don't really care, either. The way things are going, AD is it for me, and I'll make it work one way or another. :-)