Forum Discussion

thomas_hirsch's avatar
thomas_hirsch
Ideator I
29 days ago
Solved

R37 docs: any bulk-access, single-page, or PDF option?

Hi all,

Coming from R35 where PDFs were offered alongside the Online Docs, we noticed R37 dropped the PDFs and split each guide into many short pages reached only through the left-side tree.

A few questions:
- Is there a downloadable bundle (zip, EPUB, consolidated PDF) for R37 that we missed?
- A "full guide on one page" / print-friendly view we can link our team to?
- A sitemap or index endpoint for the documentation portal?

Onboarding new admins and cross-referencing topics has gotten harder when each section is split across dozens of one-minute pages. Any pointer to a denser format would help a lot.

Thanks!

AI
Claude
Documents
Download Files
  • christopher_gillis's avatar
    christopher_gillis
    29 days ago

    Hello,

    If you have access to the CD Image, the PDFs for all of the documents should be available in the Documentation folder there. I've also raised this topic with our docs team to see if we can add the PDF links back to the docs site. I'll reply here when I hear back from them. 

    Chris

5 Replies

  • christopher_gillis's avatar
    christopher_gillis
    Community Manager
    29 days ago

    Hello,

    If you have access to the CD Image, the PDFs for all of the documents should be available in the Documentation folder there. I've also raised this topic with our docs team to see if we can add the PDF links back to the docs site. I'll reply here when I hear back from them. 

    Chris

  • eli_donahue's avatar
    eli_donahue
    Community Manager
    29 days ago

    Also, thanks for the feedback about the documentation usability! The initial priority was to transition from static PDF content to live content on docs.aras.com - enabling Aras to continually improve content and ensuring folks can always find the latest relevant docs and guides for their release. Now that there’s a solid content base, I’m hoping we can work on improving the user experience. Feedback like yours helps!

  • eduard_gorpasin's avatar
    eduard_gorpasin
    Ideator I
    24 days ago

    thomas_hirsch​
    The current documentation implementation is Online Docs AND PDFs.

    However, the PDF option relies on an auto-backgound job triggered on publish. 
    In theory, on Publish, a PDF rendition is auto-generated and the Arrow down (Download PDF) button should appear on each page. The higher you are in the left-menu, the more inclusive the PDF is, which covers the use case you need.

    But, as of June 2 26, this does not happen.
    We are currently trying to get Brightspot* team for a call to solve this.
    (* Brightspot= name of the CMU hosting docs.aras.com)

    In case you need an immediate solution, ping me directly to discuss a temporary ZIP solution.

  • thomas_hirsch's avatar
    thomas_hirsch
    Ideator I
    24 days ago

    eduard_gorpasin​
    Thanks for your response

    I have now built a crawler that is based on the HTML version of the documentation.
    There are two advantages of doing it this way:
    1. It is relatively straight forward to convert this into Markdown files that Claude Code accesses via MCP calls.
    2. From the left navigation I get a table of contents (rendered as JSON) so that Claude can find and access only the specific files it needs.

    The only downside is that crawling the 1000+ pages takes a few hours.
    Initially I wanted to avoid this scraping work, but on the other hand, using PDFs would be harder and much more brittle to convert into a format that Claude Code can easily read. Getting specific images, if required, is also easier when read directly from the web.

    So actually, the web version works just fine for me right now.

    If Aras ever wanted to better serve AI/agent tooling, the cheapest win would be a Markdown rendition per page (e.g. a .md URL suffix) and maybe an additional llms.txt, which would basically be the left navigation tree as Markdown, with links to individual Markdown pages, which could replace my crawled JSON.




    • eduard_gorpasin's avatar
      eduard_gorpasin
      Ideator I
      24 days ago

      thomas_hirsch​ 
      I have a python script that crawls the website, converts all HTML to .md, and saves it locally. Can share it.

      You can then use this folder as a Vault in Obsidian, and, voila, you have docs.aras.com at home, assets linked (these are still retrieved when online). 

      The downside is that at Aras Innovator volumes, it takes indeed a good 2 hours.
      I'm glad you are not blocked by this PDF thing.