Visibility settings & actions menu

When in Assemble Document mode, the top right corner of the document toolbar contains a symbol. Clicking this symbol triggers the “visibility settings & actions menu”. Below is a summary of what each of these settings or actions does.

Actions

Browse to selected clause

If a clause is selected, clicking this button will bring you to the location of the relevant clause (in your clause library) in the Browse pane of the operations panel.

Send to Q&A

(Assuming you have the right to create Q&As) this button will be enabled as soon as you have saved your document at least once. It sends the document (including any inputs to datafields) to the Design Q&A mode.

Reload contents

Reload contents re-fetches the entire document, and all its clauses, from the server, and then recalculates the entire document. This is roughly similar to closing the document and re-opening it again. This should only be used on rare occasions, e.g. when you know that a colleague has changed a clause in his/her own browser, and you want to fetch those changes.

The difference with recalculate contents (part of the document toolbar) is that recalculate contents (Ctrl-Shift-E) does not load any contents from the server, and merely recalculates the already-available content in your browser.

Compare with previous state

Clicking this button will show what changes your last action (adding/removing a clause, changing a datafield,…) has made in the document in a manner that is similar to the track changes view in Microsoft Word. This view can also be triggered by holding the Alt-key (Option-key on the Mac) and clicking inside the document.

Visibility

With the exception of the Reporting mode of document setting, none of the settings impact how your exported document will look like!

Invisible clauses

Enabled by default. Toggles whether invisible clauses are shown (in red strikethrough) in your document. Invisible clauses are clauses that are included in the document but that will not be visible in any export because the conditions for their visibility (included in its Enabled? property) have not been fulfilled, or because their “ancestor clauses” are not visible.

Invisible text (due to shrinking)

Disabled by default. Toggles whether any text is visible (with a dark blue background) that is not currently visible because the shrinking level is set too high.

Reporting mode of document

Disabled by default. Toggles the reporting mode that may hide or modify the contents of certain clauses to present a different — often shorter — view of the document.

Clause comments

Enabled by default. Toggles the symbol that, if enabled, will be shown to the left of a clause that contains a legal comment.

Clause datafields indicator

Enabled by default. Toggles the visibility of the light blue vertical bar shown to the left of certain clauses.

This blue vertical bar will be shown if a clause uses at least one datafield in the content title, content body, reporting or enabled? section — either directly or indirectly (e.g., through data-expressions or inclusions of other clauses).

Clause shrinking opportunities

Disabled by default. Toggles the symbol that will be shown to the right of a clause that contains shrinking opportunities — i.e. text that can be shown/hidden by changing the shrinking level by using the Shrink or expand text menu-option in the upper-right menu.

Clause alternatives

Enabled by default. Toggles the that will be shown to the right of a clause that has one or more alternatives (based on the incoming/outgoing links that that clause has).

Performance

The performance subsection contains settings that can be disabled to improve the speed of working in Clause9 with very large documents.

Only render visible text in large document

Enabled by default, you should probably only ever change this if you are working with very long documents.

For those interested in the technical details of this setting: in documents that host less than 150 clause files, Clause9 always pre-renders all paragraphs, even those paragraphs that currently happen to be outside your browser’s viewport (e.g., paragraphs near the end of the document, while you are currently seeing the beginning of the document). Such pre-rendering takes some time from your computer’s processor, but provides for a very smooth experience when scrolling through the document.

In most situations, the time taken to pre-render is negligble (20 to 30 milliseconds). However, in very long documents, it can become annoying — particularly because this pre-rendering has to be done every time you change something, or switch to a different part of the software. For such very long documents, Clause9 will therefore defer the pre-rendering until a paragraph is actually visible in your browser because you scrolled towards it.

Deferring the pre-rendering is much quicker, but has two downsides: scrolling through the document is less smooth, and it will not be possible to find text (through Ctrl-F / Command-F on Mac) that is currently outside your browser’s viewport. If you want to avoid these disadvantages, and always pre-render all text, then you should disable “only render visible text in large document”.

Calculate clause numbering

Enabled by default. Toggles whether Clause9 always recalculates the numbering of clauses on-the-fly. When disabled, clause numbering will not be automatically adapted when inserting, removing, enabling or disabling clauses or when changing the position of clauses.

Probably the only situation in which you want to disable this setting, is when you are in the process of bulk inserting clauses in a very long document, and the actual numbering/cross-referencing/definitions are not relevant to you at that point in time.

If this setting is disabled, you can still force Clause9 to recalculate the numbering of the current document by pressing the recalculate contents button (shortcut Ctrl-Shift-E).

Technical details: with every change you make, Clause9 will need to recalculate all clause numbers, all cross-references and all definitions. (E.g., if you remove some defined term from a clause near the end of the document, then this removal may cause the term to disappear from the definition list because it is no longer used anywhere in the document, and may also cause some other clauses to disappear whose condition depended on that term being used in the document, which may cause yet other clauses to disappear, as well as impact cross-references referring to those clauses, etc.)

Obviously, such recalculations can take time for very long and/or complex documents.

Calculate cross-references

Enabled by default. Toggles whether Clause9 (re)calculates any cross-references inside the document/binder. See the technical details above to understand why this (re)calculation may take time, and when you may occasionally want to disable this setting.

If this setting is disabled, you can still force Clause9 to recalculate cross-references by pressing the recalculate contents button (shortcut Ctrl-Shift-E).

Calculate definitions

Enabled by default. Toggles whether Clause9 automatically recalculates the definition list. See the technical details above to understand why this (re)calculation may take time, and when you may occasionally want to disable this setting.

If this setting is disabled, you can still force Clause9 to recalculate definitions by pressing the recalculate contents button (shortcut Ctrl-Shift-E).