Stantia’s PDF creator enables you to effortlessly create PDFs from your boat listings with just a couple of clicks. These can be used for sending full-spec PDFs to potential buyers, getting vendor sign-off before publishing a listing, and single-page window cards to display in your brokerage or dealership.
There are two steps:
First, create your templates
Then click Create PDF on a boat, select which template to use and Stantia will generate your PDF
Let’s go through these steps in more detail.
Step 1: Creating your templates
Log into Stantia and click Boat PDF templates in the left menu. This page lists all the templates created by you or your team. If it’s not showing any, it just means you haven’t created any yet.
To create a new template, click + Create new template.
To edit or delete a template, click the pencil or delete icons.
We’ll now run through the settings on the create/edit template page.
Name, type and orientation
Give your template a name. Make it descriptive so it’s easy to identify it later. If you’re creating different templates for metric and imperial units, you might want to include this in the name. For example, “My template metric” and “My template imperial”.
Choose the type of template from the Template type list:
Brochure: A multi-page, full-specification PDF
Window card: A single-page PDF with just the main photo and some general information for hanging in your office window or on your wall
In the Orientation list, choose whether you want portrait or landscape orientation.
When we display your template names in Stantia, we’ll add the type and orientation, so you don’t need to add those to your template names. For example, if you name your template “My template metric” and it’s a portrait-brochure template, we’ll display it as “My template metric (Brochure | Portrait)”.
Choose your units of measurement
As PDFs are not interactive, there’s no way for your customers to choose their preferred units of measurement. So, you might want to create multiple templates using different units depending on who you’re sending the PDF to. For example:
British people use a mixture of units. Generally speaking, younger people favour metric units, whilst older people are often more familiar with imperial units.
Most other European countries use the metric system.
Imperial units are widely used in the United States.
As well as standard metric and imperial units, nautical-specific units (knots and nautical miles) are also available.
You don’t need to worry about conversions between units as that all happens automatically in the background.
Fonts and colours
Choose your fonts and colours to match your branding. Although we only have Arial and Times New Roman fonts available now, we’ll be adding more options soon.
To choose a colour, click on the colour to display the colour selector.
To get an exact colour, it’s best to enter the colour code which you can do by clicking the HEX or RGB buttons and entering the colour code:
HEX: A hexadecimal colour code. Three pairs of two characters, each representing the red, green and blue values in that order.
RGB: Enter the red, green and blue values in that order which can each range from 0 to 255. Leave the fourth digit set to “1” this is the alpha (or transparency) setting.
For example, to set a colour to bright blue, you’d use these values:
HEX: #0000FF
RGB: rgba(0, 0, 255, 1)
Remember to click Save on the colour selector once you’ve selected your colour.
Separator styles controls the colour of horizontal lines between sections. If you don’t want to display these, you can hide them by setting them to white to match the page colour.
Gallery options
Here you can choose whether your photos have rounded or square corners. And whether to display captions under the photos. Note that a caption is not displayed on the PDF for the main photo, only for the subsequent photos.
Header contact options
These settings control what contact information is displayed on your PDF and whether a logo is displayed in the header area.
If you’re co-brokering a boat, you might want to send an unbranded PDF to another broker. If so, you can leave all the header contact options set to None. For easy reference, you might want to add the word “unbranded” to your template’s name.
If you have multiple offices, you don’t need to create separate templates for each of them. Just make sure your boats are assigned to the appropriate office and the PDF creator will use the contact details / logo for that office. Just select “Assigned office” for each piece of information you want to display.
Broker-specific information: You can optionally show the name of the broker that the boat is assigned to and display their email address instead of the office email address. For this to work, boats must be assigned to a specific user.
Finalising the template
Once you’re done, click Save at the bottom to save your template. You’re now ready to create PDFs.
Step 2: Generating a PDF
Now comes the easy part – generating a PDF from a boat listing.
Click Boats in the left menu, find the relevant boat, click the Create PDF button in the Actions column, select which template you want to use and click Export.
Your PDF will be generated and will download to your browser when it’s ready. While the PDF is generating, don’t navigate away from the page, otherwise your browser may cancel the download.
You can also find a Create PDF button on the view-boat page.
Congratulations! You now have your PDF which you can print or attach to an email to send to a customer.
Handy hints
Header information not displaying
Make sure that you’ve turned on all the items you want to display in the template’s Header contact options.
If the logo is not displaying, make sure that the boat is assigned to an office and ensure that office has a logo added. You can add a logo to an office in Settings > Offices/locations > Edit > Logo. Note that only administrators can access the Settings menu.
If it’s the name or email address of the assigned broker that’s not displaying, make sure that option is specified in the template and ensure the boat is assigned to a person.
Window card tips
No description showing
Make sure your boat’s PDF window card description is filled in. Because there’s generally not enough space on a single page to show the whole description, Stantia has a specific field for your PDF window card description. To access this, go to the Description tab when editing a boat.
Photo too small
Because everything needs to fit on a single page, Stantia automatically shrinks the main photo to allow everything to fit if needed. If this is making your photo too small, try giving it some more room by:
Reducing the amount of information in the header area
Or shortening your PDF window card description