Producing a side-lined PDF of an as-amended Bill version using auto-apply (in Scotland and the Senedd)

The guidance below relates to Scottish Bills and Senedd Cymru Bills only. In particular, some of the auto-apply behaviours described here are not present when working on UK Bills or Northern Ireland Assembly Bills in Lawmaker.

For more general instructions on using auto-apply to produce amended versions of Bills in all jurisdictions, see Auto-application of amendments to a Bill version.

In the Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru, at the end of Stage 2 and Stage 3, a side-lined copy of the as-amended Bill is produced. This page describes how to produce this side-lined PDF: the manual process is described first, followed by the automatic process. There is a note at the end about publishing side-lined versions of Bills.

Manually creating side-lined PDFs

In Lawmaker, you can create a PDF of a Bill document which includes side-lines against any provisions which have changed by following these steps:

1. In the Editor, turn on change tracking (by clicking the binoculars icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen: )

2. Make some changes to your Bill; these will appear in blue or red depending on whether you are inserting or deleting content

3. Open the “Document” menu at the top of the screen and select “Generate PDF”

4. In the modal which appears on-screen, select the “side lining” option and confirm.
   Note: you can also select “show changes applied” to generate a PDF in which all tracked changes have been accepted. Side-lines will appear against any provisions containing tracks. Where whole provisions have been deleted in track (e.g. whole sections or Schedules), side-lines will appear next to the space between the remaining provisions which are located before and after the deleted provision.

The remaining part of this page describes how to produce this side-lined copy automatically, using the auto-apply feature in Lawmaker.

Using auto-apply to create a side-lined as-amended Bill version

You can create the side-lined as-amended version of a Bill by following these steps:

1. On the Amendment Manager, in the table of amendments, select all the agreed amendments from the completed amending stage (or any subset of amendments in the list which you want to try to apply to the Bill)

2. From the Amendment Actions menu, select “Apply amendments”

3. Choose one of the options in the modal: in most cases, the first option - “Create new Bill version” - is the appropriate choice. This will generate a new amended version of the Bill by applying the selected amendments to whichever published Bill version is associated with those amendments.
   Specify a folder name and version label and confirm

4. Once this process completes, return to the Project tab, and open the newly generated version in the Editor

5. On the right-hand side, click the pencil icon to open the “inline amendments” panel, which will list all the amendments which successfully applied. Note you should also check the “review” panel, which will contain comments corresponding to any amendments which did not apply successfully. Those amendments will need to be applied manually. See Why did my amendment not auto-apply?

6. Check each applied amendment and accept it by clicking the “Accept amendment” button on each amendment card:

   

   You can also completely remove an amendment by clicking the Reject button (the cross icon).
   If you notice a small textual error or printing point which will still need correcting after accepting the amendment, you can still do this at a subsequent point, after accepting the amendment.

7. When you accept each amendment, you will see that Lawmaker records the changes made by the amendment as tracked changes in the Editor:

   

   Where an amendment leaves out or substitutes some text or structure in the Bill, the generated track-changes will record the location of the deletion without preserving the text, as in the screenshot below:

   

8. You should not need to accept or reject any of these auto-generated track-changes. However, note that it’s possible to accept or reject each one using the “review” panel on the right-hand side of the Editor (the same as for manually created tracks). If you notice any problems with the side-lined PDF generated in the next step, you may be able to correct those issues by accepting or rejecting certain changes and re-creating them manually.

9. Generate the side-lined version of the Bill by opening the “Documents” menu, choosing “Generate PDF”, then selecting these options:

   1. Show changes applied

   2. Side-lining

   3. Line numbering (this should already be selected)

   4. Record snapshot version (this should already be selected).

Publishing the “as amended” Bill version

Once you are happy with the side-lined PDF of the amended version of the Bill, you can publish the PDF snapshot from the Project tab:

1. Expand the list of snapshots under the green working version in which you have been working on applying the amendments

2. Find the PDF snapshot in the list which you want to publish

3. From the Actions menu next to that snapshot, select “Publish”

4. A modal will appear and tell you the version rubric your new version will be published under; make sure this is set correctly (e.g. As Amended at Stage 2). The modal will also report whether you have accepted (or rejected) all auto-applied amendments in the document

5. After confirming, a new Bill version will be published in the system.

Note that Lawmaker accepts all tracks in the Bill version as part of the final publishing step above, so there is no need to create a duplicate “clean” version of the “as amended” Bill in which all tracks have been manually accepted. The system does this as part of publishing.

When the next amending stage is concluding (e.g. Stage 3), simply follow the auto-apply process set out above (steps 1-9), selecting the agreed amendments from that subsequent amending stage and applying them to the published “as amended at Stage 2” version.