Catalog PDF Generation - All Catalogs

Coursedog Support

Modified on: Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 1:52 PM

Table of Contents

Overview

Generating a PDF of your catalog – and making it available for download for anyone who visits your page – is quick and easy for administrative Coursedog users.
You can also generate a custom PDF for reporting or archival purposes.

Step 1: Navigate to Catalog > Settings > Catalogs.

Step 2 (Optional):

If you wish to include pages from Curriculum – departments, programs, and/or courses – in your PDF, click “PDF Settings” and then check the appropriate boxes.
As shown below, the Catalog PDF displays courses and programs as part of the department. As a result, the department page must be published for departments, programs, and courses to be included in the PDF Export.

Step 3: Select “Save”.

Step 4: Click “Generate PDF” under the actions tab of the catalog you wish to export.

Step 5:

You can give visitors to your public site the ability to download PDFs for individual departments (shown below).
Department PDFs follow the settings established for the main PDF available on your public site. This means they are ONLY generated when a department has a department overview.
This option will automatically appear on the department’s page, provided you generate a complete PDF (i.e. “Include the entire catalog content in generated document” is toggled to the right) and “Include Departments” is checked under “PDF Settings”.

Administrative users also have the ability to create a custom PDF for administrative, accreditation, and/or archival purposes.
The PDF linked on your public webpage will continue to be the most recently generated complete PDF, regardless of when a custom PDF may have been created.

Step 1: Navigate to Catalog > Settings > Catalogs.

Step 2: Select “Generate PDF”.

Step 3: Switch this toggle to the left (“off”) to NOT include all catalog content in the PDF.

Step 4:

De-activating the toggle will bring up an index of all catalog content for that catalog scope.
Select the specific items you want to include in the custom PDF.

Step 5:

When you add Curriculum pages to your catalog PDF, as indicated in Step 2 under “Generating a Complete PDF”, the order of the PDF generated is: custom pages, department pages, program pages, and course pages.
Courses and programs added to the PDF are restricted by the course and program filters defined within that catalog.

When Curriculum pages are added to your catalog, the following fields are used:

Title is: {subjectCode}{courseNumber} {name}
Credits:
- Default view is {numberOfCredits} {description}
- This display can also be configured to match the online catalog view by using {minCredits <> macCredits}

When you generate a PDF of a catalog, it will be accessible in three ways:

A PDF will be emailed to you as soon as it is generated.
You can select “Download” at Catalog > Settings > Catalogs for a copy to download to your computer.
It will be made available to users in the footer of the public catalog (unless you have opted to hide that option, as indicated here).

If you so choose, you can make the “download pdf” option more prominent by placing a link to it on the navigation bar.
Any PDFs added via the below process will not automatically link to newly generated PDFs, and you will need to update the link if you regenerate the PDF.

Generate PDF version of the catalog.
Right click on the link in the footer.
Copy the URL.
Create an External Link on your navigation bar, label it “Download Catalog as PDF”, and use the copied link as the URL