Version 16 of Lawmaker introduces some new features, updates the look and feel of the Editor and includes some bug fixes.
New features and improvements
Large print PDFs
There is now an option when generating a PDF of a document (e.g. Bill, SI, amendment list) to produce a large print version. That will produce a PDF where all the text is 20pt Arial to aid readability. This is a general features designed to work across all document types but there may still be some edge cases where the output isn’t perfect (e.g. numbers may overlap with text in certain circumstances) and we’ll be improving this feature in future versions based on additional feedback.
See Generating and viewing a PDF .
Generation of PDFs and publishing documents in the background
Rather than having to wait until the operation is complete, you can now continue to work when doing the following:
Generating a PDF (from the Project tab or within the Editor)
Publishing a document
Importing a document from legislation.gov.uk
When the operation is finished, you’ll see a notification pop up at the bottom of the screen. In the case of PDFs, you can click on the notification to open the PDF.
New version of Oxygen Web Author
The Editor in Lawmaker is now based on Oxygen Web Author version 25.1.
This brings a number of minor improvements and fixes but also changes the look and feel of some aspects of the Editor. Specific things to note:
the design of the panels at the right hand side (e.g. Document Checks and Document Information) has changed so icons are used instead of names.
Find and replace (ctrl+F) now appears as a panel on the right hand side rather than as a dialog box. makes it easier to see both the search panel and the document with results highlighted. Moreover, it makes it possible to see all search results at a glance without having to scroll through the document.
A Tags Display Mode switcher was added directly in the breadcrumb bar to make it easier to change the amount of Tags that are displayed when exploring the document structure.
Upgrading the version of Oxygen also resolves some security flaws present in earlier versions.
[External X-refs
The Tag X-ref function will now tag some external references as well as internal references.
By “external reference” we mean a reference to an Act, secondary legislation or EU legislation.
The references that are currently handled are those references where the Act or SI title is included as part of the reference, e.g. “section 5 of the Criminal Justice Act 2000” or “paragraph (1) and (2) of regulation 45 of the Procurement Regulations 2023”.
The feature uses the data behind legislation.gov.uk to lookup and identify the appropriate legislative documents.
External references that are not currently handled (but will be tackled in later releases) include:
References that refer back to a previously mentioned Act or SI etc., e.g. “section 7 of that Act”
References that implicitly external due to their context but don’t directly include the title of the Act or SI etc., e.g. references in provisions following a statement like “Section 32 of the Criminal Justice Act 2000 is amended as follows.”
References that rely on defined names for an Act or SI rather than its proper name, e.g. “Regulation 17 of the 2009 Regulations”]
UK and Scottish Bills - Order of Consideration validation
When you save changes to an Order of Consideration (accessed on the Amendment Manager Tab), Lawmaker will now validate that every clause/section/schedule mentioned in the updated Order exists in the published version of the Bill. This enables you to fix the issue before it results in issues when you try and generate an amendment list based on the Order.
Cancelling Save operation
You can now cancel a save operation mid-way through and be able to continue working on the document or retry saving it.
To cancel the save, click on the banner at the bottom of the screen. The banner will change when the save operation gets to a point when it can no longer be cancelled.
When you cancel a save: you will be taken back to the Editor, your document will be as it was before the save, and you will be able to make further changes to it. The save button should be activated allowing you to restart the save operation.
This is particularly to help in the situation reported by users in some organisations that the save operation gets stuck at 0% or later but it may also be useful where you have triggered a save on a large document by accident and don’t want to wait until it is complete.
Auto-application of amendments - checking for page/line information
Before attempting to apply any amendments to a Bill, Lawmaker now checks that the Bill version you are applying amendments to contains the necessary page and line information. This is to prevent the case where all amendments fail to apply due to the lac
Improved sorting of ping pong motions in the Lords - amendments to amendments
Document check improvements
A number of improvements have been made to Document checks. These include fixes to existing checks and new rules:
New rules
Identify page breaks in document - LDAPP-3177 - LMS-913 - Getting issue details... STATUS - pattern ID "page-breaks"
Identify table cells that contain quoted structures or nested tables and warn of line numbering issues - pattern ID "tables" updated
Identify definitions that contain two //p elements as likely occurrences of copy/paste error (user probably meant to create two definitions - pattern ID "definitions" updated
Identify empty definitions - LEGDEV-6125 - pattern ID "definitions" updated. Quickfix added to delete empty element
Identify <inline name="placeholder"> and <ref class="placeholder"> elements that are non-empty. Dealing with the case identified where an SI was submitted that had a footnote inserted within a placeholder. pattern ID "placeholders". Quickfixes to remove placeholder in 1st case and remove content in 2nd case.
Identify cases where there is an <intro> but no children - [LMS-1642] Invalid structure in UKPGA 2023/37 - Jira Service Management (atlassian.net) - pattern id "intros" - added quickfix to convert intro to content -
Identify provisions that have 2 num elements and add quickfix to delete second one - LMS-2019 - Getting issue details... STATUS - pattern "hcontainer" updated and quickfix to remove any additional nums added
Identify unnumbered paragraphs that begin with something that looks like a number - LEGDEV-6090 - pattern id "unnumbered-paragraphs" - quickfix to remove the number added.
Fix/update existing rules
Correct numbering check for EUProv2 elements (paragraphs) which should be Arabic numerals followed by a full stop - LMS-2295 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Allow schedule numbers to be in the form "Appendix x" rather than "Schedule x" - LMS-1807 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Remove the false positives where ping pong amendment's docStage doesn't match Consolidated List docStage because of the addition of the Bill number to the list stage version - LMS-1812 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Deal with false positives in relation to the error message warning of two lists back-to-back - [LMS-2302] Explanatory notes and an error message - Jira Service Management (atlassian.net)
Remove following error - When opening a single schedule with 'Edit portion of document', the following validation issue occurs "Advisory: There is only one schedule so its number should be "Schedule" not "Schedule 3"
Deal with feedback on legal numbering from v.15 version (see
LDAPP-4191).Update x-ref rule that checks citation matches @href attribute to cope with external reference - pattern ID "invalid-xrefs"