ASL Converter

Extract text from ASL files

Select File
Drop or upload your .ASL file

Online File Converter

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How to extract text from your ASL file

Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your ASL file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert ASL to another file type

To convert your ASL file to another format, you need Adobe Photoshop or other Settings software.

ASL to AGL
ASL to INI
ASL to CFG
ASL to CONF
ASL to CONFIG
ASL to JSON
ASL to XML
ASL to YAML
ASL to YML
ASL to TOML
ASL to ENV
ASL to PROPERTIES

Convert a file to ASL

To convert other file formats to the "Graphics Preset" file type, you need software like Adobe Photoshop or a similar tool.

ZSHRC to ASL
CONF to ASL
RCFILE to ASL
GITCONFIG to ASL
RC to ASL
PLIST to ASL
BASHRC to ASL
CONFIG to ASL
PROFILE to ASL
INI to ASL
PREFS to ASL
CFG to ASL

About ASL files

The .ASL extension serves two distinct, incompatible ecosystems, often confusing users trying to open them. Most commonly, an .ASL file is an Adobe Photoshop Layer Style, a proprietary library of visual effects (like drop shadows, bevels, or metallic textures) that can be applied to layers with a single click. The core friction here is that .ASL files are binary containers - you cannot view the style or "preview" the effects without loading them directly into the presets manager of Adobe Photoshop. They are not image files; they are instruction sets for rendering images.

Alternatively, on Apple macOS, .ASL stands for Apple System Log. Unlike standard text logs found on Linux, these are binary databases stored in /var/log/asl designed for high-performance querying by the system syslogd daemon. Because they are binary, attempting to open them in a standard text editor like Notepad or TextEdit results in garbled nonsense.

Conversion Strategies:

For Designers: To share or view styles outside of Adobe software, you must apply the style to a dummy layer and export the result to standard raster formats like PNG or JPG. Some third-party preset managers allow exporting style previews.
For Admins: To audit Apple logs for troubleshooting, you must convert the binary .ASL to plain TXT or CSV using the macOS Console app or command-line tools like syslog.
For Gamers: If the file is small and text-based, it may be an Auto Splitter script for LiveSplit, written in XML or C# logic, which can be edited in any code editor.

Convert.Guru analyzes your ASL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted JPG, PSD, PNG, ASF, ALS, ASI, DSL, PAT, ZIP, BRUSHSET, ASP, JPEG and DOCX files.

The ASL Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ASL converter.