Document formatting

Why documents fall apart when someone edits them

Most business documents are formatted by eye. Someone presses space to indent, types "3.2" before a heading, makes text bold and bigger to look like a heading, and types the table of contents by hand. It looks right on the day. Then a colleague adds a section, the numbering is wrong from that point on, the contents page lists the wrong pages, and the next hour goes on fixing it by hand.

We rebuild the document on styles. Every heading, paragraph, list, table and caption gets a named style, and numbering, contents and cross-references are linked to those styles. After that, adding a section renumbers everything and updates the contents automatically. The document looks the same as a well-formatted one, but it behaves differently when touched.

Long documents, strict specifications and PDFs people can use

Tender responses, theses and regulatory submissions often come with exact rules: margins, fonts, heading levels, page numbering that restarts at each section, a contents page in a set format. Missing one can get a submission returned. We work to the specification line by line and check the final file against it before delivery.

The PDF matters as much as the source file. An exported PDF without bookmarks is hard to navigate at 200 pages. One without tagged headings is close to unusable for someone with a screen reader, and public bodies increasingly require accessible files. We export with bookmarks and tags, then check the PDF page by page against the source.

Google Docs handles styles and a contents page well, but has fewer tools for numbered captions and complex cross-references than Word. If your document needs those, we will say so at the start and suggest which tool to keep it in.