To create print ready documentation for either distribution via electronic media or printing and assembly into folders, you will need to check and format the MS Word documents previously output as detailed in the Outputs - Documents & Files article. 

 

The MS Word document will need to be checked for the following.

 

1. Tables - ensure these are formatted to meet the page dimensions. You can do this using the resize font, cell padding and row and column resizing tools built into MS Word.
2. Page breaks and paragraphs - add/remove page breaks to suit your layout.
3. Hyperlinks - spot check and test the embedded file hyperlinks work (for hyperlinks to work, ensure that the data folder is in the root location of the MS word document and data folder/files haven't been moved or renamed).  Links may also be in a smaller font, change to font size 11 
4. Headers and Footers  - check and correct as necessary.
5. Cover page - insert project details, artwork etc.
6. Table of contents / index - run the update table tool in MS Word and ensure all contents and page numbers appear. If you make any changes after you have created the table, click UPDATE again

 

If required, you can now export this to a .pdf format to create and record version for distribution.

 

To help user navigation of the .pdf version, you can within the .pdf creator tool set the document opening properties -  e.g. page view, page scrolling, bookmarks displayed etc. 

 

The folder contents can now be distributed by copying the entire contents to electronic media (e.g. memory stick) or creating a .zip file for file transfer.

 

Fig 01: File explorer view of output folders and files

 

Note: The MS Word/.pdf hyperlinks to the linked data files will not work if:

 

• the information is transferred to cloud based file storage system (e.g. Aconex, Asite, Dropbox, Sharepoint, Viewpoint etc).
• the data folder is renamed or moved to a different location to the MS Word/.pdf file document.

 

If this is required, then you will need to reassign each of the file hyperlink paths in the MS Word document reflect the  new file path location.  

 

There are solutions available to automate/bulk reassign hyperlinks, for further details please contact us by raising a support ticket.

 

To create a single continuous version of the document (not recommended) you can use a product such as Adobe Acrobat to insert and combine the .pdf files (located within the data folder) with the primary .pdf document.

 

Note: This may create large unmanageable files that are time consuming to open and update.

 

Still have questions? Have a look at the FAQ's.