Your first document

This is the one path every document takes, walked once. It assumes you have a workspace and can sign in; everything else starts from zero.

Create the document

Create a new document and give it a name — the name is required, because an untitled document is unfindable the moment there are two of them. The document starts as a draft that only your workspace can see.

If your workspace has templates, you can also start from one: the template brings its structure and its input fields with it, and you fill in the values instead of the wording. That path has its own guide.

Give it structure

Write into sections and clauses rather than one long text. Structure is not cosmetic here: numbering is derived from it, so nothing drifts when a paragraph moves, and cross-references point at the clause itself — not at the number the clause happened to have when you typed the reference. Titled sections are also the unit that approvals attach to later, so a document that is well-sectioned is a document that can be signed off in meaningful pieces.

Bring in the people

People join the workspace, not the individual document, and a document grants roles from viewer up to owner — to individuals or to whole teams. Someone with no access to a document does not see that it exists. For a first document it is enough that editors write and everyone else reads and comments.

Comment

Comments anchor to the wording they are about and stay threaded there, so a discussion does not detach from the sentence that caused it. A comment is a question about the document — it changes nothing by itself, and it is not an approval.

Approve

Turn on Require approval in the document’s access settings and name who approves: each approver is a person or a team, and every titled section needs a sign-off from each of them. An approval binds to the exact wording that was approved — edit the section and its approval falls away, automatically; leave it untouched and the approval survives later versions. The approvals guide has the full mechanics.

Generate the PDF

Export the document as a PDF at any point — approval is not a gate. While the document requires approval and any section is still unapproved, the PDF says so with a DRAFT · UNAPPROVED watermark; once every section is signed off, the watermark is gone and what you hand over is derived from the approved record, not assembled beside it. When a system rather than a person produces the document, the same generation runs over the Document API.