Introduction
Publishing a Bill on Lawmaker does several things:
It makes a copy of the Bill (XML and PDF) available via the API so that other systems, e.g. a Parliament’s website publishing system, can pick it up and use it.
It marks the particular version of the Bill as one that can be used in Lawmaker for an amending stage, i.e.
It creates a significant version of the Bill that is available on the Project Tab to users in all organisations
For the time being, the Scottish Parliament website will be continuing to publish PDF renditions of the bill. These will be supplied to the website through existing channels rather than a direct, electronic interface from Lawmaker. The same applies to UK bills, there is no direct link from publishing a bill in Lawmaker to publishing a bill on UK Parliament’s website. As such, ‘publishing’ in this context is merely marking the bill as having been published. You will need to have generated a PDF that you are happy with before you can mark the bill as having been published.
There is currently no direct link from publishing a Bill in Lawmaker to publishing a Bill on the UK Parliament’s or Scottish Parliament’s website.
How to publish a Bill
If you haven’t already, generate a PDF of the Bill you want to publish
From the Project Tab, click on the toggle next to the working version that you wish to publish to expand the view to show the snapshot versions underneath
Find the PDF snapshot that will be used for publishing and select Publish version from the drop-down menu
The system will present a warning message, making sure you have selected the right PDF to mark as having been published
Select Publish button to publish the chosen bill version associated to the PDF
The system will:
create a significant version marked as “Published”, visible to all users in the system containing the PDF and the bill version that produced it
create a snapshot version in the working document snapshot series containing the PDF and version of the bill that was published
Hints and tips
All other users of the system can view the significant version produced.
Other users will be able to open the bill version in the Editor (in read-only format), view the PDF, generate their own PDF (if they wanted to select different presentation options), download a zip file containing the PDF and bill XML or generate a duplicate version.
You will still need to send the actual PDF (Scottish Parliament users) or ZIP file (UK Parliament users) to the web/publishing team according to existing processes to publish the bill on the website. Please make sure it is the same PDF that you marked as having been ‘published’ in the system to ensure data integrity between Lawmaker and the website whilst there is no electronic interface as yet.