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Re: Bylaws

for

From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Mar 9, 2015 10:51PM


That document is published as a more readably formatted version of the official rule. You might notice that the indentations are much smaller than those in comparable documents. We felt it was important to have a meaningful amount of text on each of the shorter lines. To compensate for the wide body, we added more than single-spaced leading between the lines—although well short of the double or triple spacing sometimes used.

I haven't looked at this PDF in a long while except on my mobile phone, but if I recall correctly:
—It was formatted with heading styles down to the subchapter level, which is one level below the title of the document.
—Beyond that, we formatted the content as numbered lists.
—Because it was easy to get lost in the original format, we used the full outline numbering on each item.
—All cross references were hyperlinked.
—All tables were tagged.

At least that much was done in the source document, which was created with an MS Word template. I hope it was carried over into the PDF.

This PDF could be made much more accessible, but to do so would take a great deal of tagging by hand, at least so far as I know. This work would include:
—Selecting the text of each run-in head and identifying it as a heading. (In MS Word, I don't know that they could be anything more than the Strong first few words of a list item. I recently discovered that in PDF it's possible to tag just those words as a heading when it would make sense to do so in the document structure. In this particular document, I might go no deeper than the Section level with that approach.)
—Creating a definitions list in the Definitions subchapter (where the numbering scheme always skips an outline level).
—Adding a list of steps with hyperlinks for branching to supplement the flowchart that appears as a figure at the end. (This would not require tagging by hand, but it would have required a new round of rule development and review.)

Anyway, a Word template can deal with most of the issues involved in this sort of document, with the added advantage that switching from one style set to another can return the document to its original high-falutin' and utterly unusable format whenever necessary. :-)

Cliff Tyllick

Sent from my iPhone
Although its spellcheck often saves me, all goofs in sent messages are its fault.

> On Mar 9, 2015, at 11:36 AM, Trafford, Logan < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Yes Cliff, more or less anyway.
>
> This is a decent example. Essentially anything that has a structure where the limitations of 6 heading levels might not cut it. I find legal documents (by-laws) challenging as they do not always follow a logical structure, from either a heading structure, or multi-level list structure, even though they should!
>
> Logan
>
>