Publish Guidelines to PDF

With the Smart Trading Cloud Repository, you can export guidelines (.ecs files) to the PDF format for further printing and/or sharing.

Note Only EDI guidelines are available for publishing to PDF. Support for other standards will be added soon.

To publish a printable guideline to PDF:

  1. In the Cloud Repository, open a guideline file you want to publish.

    2. -or-

    On the left navigation bar, click , and open a guideline from a template.

  2. In the Guideline Editor, on the toolbar, click .
  3. In the Print pane that appears, configure the following settings (if required):
    • Select Print Cover Page and specify which information you want be printed on the cover page:
    • Author: Select to print the document author specified in the document properties.
    • Trading Partner: Select to print the partner name (specified in the document properties) this document is created for.
    • Select Print Table of Contents to add the guideline contents at the beginning of the document.
    • Specify the Margins (in inches) for the page sides.
    • In Header/Footer Content, specify what information must be displayed on the left, center, and right parts of the printed document. If you want to specify different header/footer settings for odd and even pages, select Customize even page header (or Customize even page footer) and provide settings for even pages (in this case, the settings you specified above will be applied to odd pages).

    You can specify the following transaction-level information you want printed in the guideline:

    • Select Print Notes to include remarks defined by the standard in the printed guideline. Selecting this option does not print your user notes.
    • Select Print Excluded Segments/Loops to print segments/loops that have been excluded in the guideline. Define a character to mark excluded segments/loops and specify if you do not want to print usage properties for segments/loops that are excluded or are part of an excluded segment or loop.
    • Select Print Semantics to include the standards-defined comment related to the segment's semantics.
    • Select Print Comments to include remarks defined by the standard as it applies to the specific segment being referenced.
    • Select Print Syntax Rules to include the standards-defined comment related to the segment's syntax.
    • Select Print Description to include the standards-defined description of the composite/element.
    • Select Print User Option to include the user-defined usage options (for example, Must use, Recommended, and so on).
    • Select Print Rules to include the business rules defined for the composite/element.
    • Select Print Repetition to include the number of times the composite/element can be repeated within the transaction.
    • Select Print Syntax to include the standards-defined comment related to the composite/element syntax.
    • Select Print Semantics to include the standards-defined comment made in reference to the composite/element semantics.
    • Select Print Comments to include remarks defined by the standard as it applies to the specific composite/element being referenced.
    • Select Use Full Width if you want to print the composite/element details by using the full table width. This reduces the number of pages required to print the guideline.
    • In User Notes Management, specify which user notes to print and in which order. You can also rename user note titles (labels), add new labels and remove notes of a specific title. The changes are applied to user notes of all guideline nodes within the corresponding node types group (Transaction User Notes, Composite, Element User Notes, or Loop, Segment User Notes group).
    • In Text Formatting, specify the styles for the user notes in the printed document and define if the notes must be printed at the section's end.
  4. If you want to reuse the specified printing settings for other guideline documents, you can create a preset. For this, click Save As, enter a name for the preset (for example, HIPAA_01), and click Save. To open the saved printing settings, click Import Preset and select a preset you want to apply for the document.
  5. To send the document for publishing, click Apply & Print to File.

    6. The PDF file you created is available in the My Files directory, in the My Print Results folder.

Note Envelope segments are not included in the printed guideline.

The preset .sdt files you create are available in the Printing Presets folder of the My Files directory. If you already have presets (saved document options) created in SpecBuilder, you can upload them to the Printing Presets folder and reuse them for guidelines in the Cloud Repository.