Preparing 'as amended' NI bill versions

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The high-level process for updating your ‘as amended’ document version

Pre-flight checks

1. Before you publish a bill, always start with a clean bill: you should have done this already when preparing the ‘As Introduced’ version but double check there are no ‘bad’ document checks, remove all comments and delete any jrefs.

2. Before applying amendments, always start with a clean set of amendments: to check if the amendments are clean—

1. Filter your list of amendments by ‘Made’ and ‘Made on division’

2. Select the filtered amendments using the checkboxes

3. Select Amendment Actions > Create temporary list 

1. View the ‘Document Checks’ right-hand panel in the Editor to check there are no mandatory warnings that need addressing

2. Remove any comments from the ‘Review’ right-hand panel

3. Save and close your temporary list

Apply amendments & check results

Using auto-apply to apply amendments

From the Amendment Manager— 

Open

Amendment Manager showing filtered amendments ready to be applied

1. Filter your list of amendments by ‘Made’ and ‘Made on division’

2. Select the filtered amendments using the checkboxes

3. Select Amendment Actions > Apply Amendments—

   1. Select ‘Create a new bill version (visible on the 'Project’ tab)

   2. Folder = “As amended at [stage]”

   3. Version description = “As amended at [stage]”

From the Project tab—

Find the newly created bill version and open it in the Editor

In the Editor—

In the ‘Inline Amendments’ right-hand panel, click on the first amendment to jump to the first amendment applied to your bill

1. Click on the tick icon on the inline amendment card in the right-hand panel to accept the amendment.

2. Check—

   1. whether any printing changes are required and make the changes as required, and

   2. any new Document Check or XML warnings have been created and fix if relevant.

3. Select the next amendment in the ‘Inline Amendments’ panel to jump to the next amendment applied to your bill.

4. Continue accepting and applying printing changes for each amendment applied to the bill.

View the ‘Review’ right-hand panel where auto-apply warning and error messages are posted.    

1. Some messages warn you that the amendments were applied but need checking e.g. if there was more than one paragraph being inserted by different amendments in the same place and the amendments didn’t have sort codes to help Lawmaker understand the order to insert them, the warning message is asking you to check the sort order. You can use the structure view to drag & drop provisions into the correct order if necessary.

2. Some messages are error messages letting you know that a certain amendment couldn’t be applied. In this case, open up the specified amendment in a temporary list and check for any obvious mistakes e.g. page-line information, incorrect punctuation in the instruction text or whitespaces at the end of the instruction if it’s inserting new provisions.

Manually applying amendments

If you need to manually apply any amendments— 

1. Open the PDF of the published bill to help work out the amendment’s location 

2. In the Amendment Manager, select the amendment(s) that could not be applied and open them in a temporary list,

3. Display the list side-by-side with your bill (use the Windows button on your keyboard with the left arrow to divide your monitor view in half)

To copy provisions inside a quoted structure—  

In the temporary list—

1. Place cursor inside the quoted structure of the amendment 

2. Right-click and select "copy content of quoted structure" (this will copy everything within the dotted line of the quoted structure, including any nested quoted structures)

In the bill—

1. Place cursor in the location where you would like to insert the copied content and use Ctrl + V.    

2. Check for locked nums when you do this, they may need manually removing (with your cursor in the num element, right-mouse-click > Lock/unlock num)  

To copy text from the amendment instruction— 

In the temporary list— 

1. Highlight and copy the text within the quote marks 

In the bill—

1. Place cursor in the location where you would like to insert the copied content and use Ctrl + V. 

Finalise document 

To finalise the document, you need to close the document in the Editor and return to the Project tab.  To minimise the number of repeating steps in this process, the recommended sequence is: 

1. Select Actions > Update Document Information and update necessary fields e.g., version rubric and dates

2. Select Actions > Finalise Document and select what you need from the options e.g., renumber, update x-refs, reinsert front/back covers including table of contents.

Final checks

Open the document in the Editor 

In the Editor—

1. If you reinserted a front cover, you may need to open the document in the Editor and check the statements are correct.

2. Check Document Checks right-hand panel 

   1. The only issues you should see here are invalid x-refs that Lawmaker was unable to resolve or benign ‘advisory’ document checks 

   2. Correct the invalid x-refs for anything obvious (or is this OLC responsibility?) 

   3. Save changes when you have dealt with all Document Check warnings 

3. Check the Table of Contents – have you got the expected number of clauses and schedules?

4. Save and close the bill 

From the Project tab—

Check the only changes to the bill are the ones you are expecting by comparing your ‘as amended’ version with the original version you copied to create the ‘as amended’ version.

1. First you will need to duplicate BOTH versions to strip out any page-line numbers

2. Find the original version stripped of page-line numbers

3. Select Actions > Compare version

Finally, send the final version of the ‘as amended’ PDF for checking