Creating PDF bundles

If you have purchased the pdfDocs option, you can transform ALB documents into PDF format, via pdfDocs from DocsCorp. This feature is invaluable for producing court bundles, with multiple documents neatly collated into one paginated PDF file.

The option to export documents to PDF is available on the Document History tab that appears on various ALB screens. If you want to produce a court bundle, your starting point will be the matter record: either Matter Details or the matter module screen.

On the Document History tab, the All Documents root folder lists all documents in the history, irrespective of whether they have been moved from the Documents folder to subfolders. This enables you to see the full list of documents and select the ones you want to add to a PDF file.

pdfDocs supported file types include:

PDF
Graphic file types such as TIF, JPG, BMP
Microsoft Office document types such as doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x), pub(x)

Creating a paginated bundle

Creating a pdf bundle involves selecting ALB documents to export to pdfDocs, creating a paginated PDF, and then importing the PDF into ALB. More detail follows.

To create a paginated bundle:

On Matter Details - Document History tab, select the All Documents root folder.
In All Documents, select the documents that you want to appear in the PDF document. To select multiple documents, hold down the control key whilst you click the documents.
Right-click the selected document(s) and click Export to PDF.
pdfDocs opens with the documents added to the pdfDocs Organiser.
Click Numbering Sets at the bottom of the pdfDocs Organiser and select a numbering scheme.
To save documents or pages marked with a tick in pdfDocs as a paginated PDF, on the pdfDocs toolbar, click Save into ALB.
After the screen has refreshed, close pdfDocs.

Note If you don’t close pdfDocs, the Export to PDF right-click option in ALB will be greyed out.

In ALB, click to refresh.

The bundled PDF displays in Document History using the document description as the PDF filename. If there are any special characters in the document description these are replaced with underscores. You can right-click the file and click Edit to amend any of the history fields if necessary.

Laserforms

pdfDocs does not yet recognise the Laserform Desktop .xfd file format. However, you can open a Laserform in Laserform Desktop and select File / Print... and select pdfDocs for the printer Name. The form will then be rendered into your current pdfDocs binder as a separate PDF that you can move into the correct place in the bundle.

More about pdfDocs

For details of further ways you can work with your documents and the capabilities of pdfDocs, please refer to the pdfDocs documentation or view the pdfDocs section of the DocsCorp web site.