Interactive long-form web pages vs professionally laid-out PDFs? Why not do both?

For a long time we have championed the idea of publishing your research outputs online in full HTML within your main website’s CMS. This makes your expertise more accessible, searchable, sharable, and increasingly, easier to use with new AI applications.

Of course, we don’t just dump all the text and figures onto a page and leave the poor users to scroll through it. 

Instead, we use a set of components including:

• an interactive table of contents (generated from chapter, section and sub-section headings within the text)
• clickable footnotes that display references inline or at the bottom of the screen (rather than using jumplinks) 
• and expandable figures (which can – and should! – also be made dynamic/interactive) 

Together these allow you to create a navigable piece of long-form content that is a pleasure to read on screens of any size. 

But the fact is, many users still want and expect PDF versions of your reports and other content. Sometimes this is because they still prefer to work from a paper copy – and even a ‘printer-friendly’ version of a web page is usually poorly laid out and hard to read. 

There is also still something symbolically powerful about a document that looks like it could be printed professionally and distributed as bound copies – even if this has become the exception rather than the rule for think tank reports these days. This makes the content feel more permanent, official and citable than it does as a webpage. 

This brings us to a bit of a dilemma. On one hand, we want to provide an engaging, interactive onscreen version of a report. On the other, delivering a PDF version by laying out the same document by hand in InDesign is a duplication of effort that few organisations can afford.

In 2020, we decided to tackle this by developing our specialised page-to-PDF functionality. Our goal was to have the CMS automatically generate a PDF version of the online report that looks, as far as we can make it, like a professionally typeset document, at no extra cost to the client after the initial setup.

We first rolled this out for the Centre for Cities – you can see a recent example here, from this source item. And, since then, we have been refining and improving the functionality as we incorporate it into more and more of the websites we design and develop. 

Here’s how it works:

• We create a dedicated secondary template, and all your relevant web-page content automatically maps to styles in the PDF document at the touch of a button. These generated PDFs have a bespoke design, in keeping with your organisation’s branding/website’s look and feel, but tailored specifically for print.
• We’ve also built in options for PDF-specific content. This means you can add things like front/back covers, running headers/footers, and page numbers that might not be suitable for the web version.
• You start by adding all the content to the CMS to create the onscreen interactive version. The PDF version is generated when you save the draft.  
• This PDF is regenerated every time you make a change to the source item online, so you only need to make any changes or updates once. This means the downloadable version on your website will always reflect the latest version.
• We can incorporate multiple page-to-PDF templates to offer different design variations, allowing you to pick between two or more templates with different cover layouts, colour schemes, ‘about us’ information etc.  
• We can also accommodate multiple languages, including languages that read right to left. 

While laying out reports using the CMS still requires some work – though substantially less than InDesign – we’re pushing the boundaries further. We are currently developing an AI-driven solution to export publications directly from Word to your CMS.

You can see some more examples of the functionality at work here:

• This Stockholm Environment Institute brief from this source item. 
• This Natural Resource Governance Institute briefing from this source item. 
• This Healthcare Financial Management Association handbook from this source item. 
• This NHS Confederation report from this source item. 
• This National Centre for Social Research report from this source item. 
• This Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative guidance note from this source item. 

Please get in touch if you would like some information about costs, or to see a live demo of the functionality at work.