Automated PDF Generation for Course Catalogs

July 6, 2018

Last updated: September 17, 2020

When colleges and universities move to a digital catalog, they often still need a print version, whether it's for accreditation, archiving, for advising to have on hand, or to print in bulk for students and prospective students. All Clean Catalog products come with on-demand PDF generation for both single pages and full catalogs. This means you can manage you catalog digitally and create elegant, automated PDFs from your digital content. Here's how it works:

Full Catalog PDF Generation

Clean Catalog now allows you to create a full PDF version of your entire catalog, which will automatically update whenever users update content You can check out Kauai Community College's full PDF catalog here.

On the back-end, catalog administrators can drag and drop content to arrange it in the order they want it. They can add optional cover and back-cover images, and adjust header and footer text. The table of contents is automatically generated, and adjusts to account for new pagination whenever content changes.

Single Page PDF Generation

For every page on your site, you can have a PDF automatically generated and available for download on that page. For a sample, check out the Values page on Bevill State Community College's catalog. In the sidebar (or at the bottom of the page on mobile), is a link to download a PDF version of that page, which you can then print as needed.

Whenever that Values page is updated, that PDF will automatically be regenerated. If, for example, a user adds another paragraph to the bottom of the page, that paragraph will automatically be added to the end of the PDF — the catalog administrator doesn't need to do anything extra to make it happen.

Section PDF Generation

Using these same principles, you can create PDFs for any sub-section of your site, and have it automatically generate the same as single-page or full-catalog PDFs. On Bevill State's catalog, for example, there's a separate PDF for just the student handbook, which updates any time any of the student handbook content is updated. This works for any section of the site — course listings, degrees, general information, or anything you want to create.

Like everything on our catalogs, PDFs will have your school's branding, and the look and feel can be customized as needed. PDF catalog generation is included as a default option in all Clean Catalog subscriptions.