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How-to
Design your PDF and Word documents, and fill in SOP details
Pick a built-in design or make your own with a cover, header, footer, watermark and SOP sections, with a live preview.
- Plan
- Free
- Reading time
- 2 min read
- Checked against Thoth for Windows on
- October 23, 2026
One design drives both PDF and Word. It says how the cover looks, what is in the header and footer, how steps are laid out and which SOP sections appear. Thoth comes with five: Modern, Classic SOP, Minimal, Corporate and Training handout. Your own designs are part of Free too.
Pick or customize a design#
- 1
Export a guide
Open the guide, choose Export, then PDF or Word.
- 2
Choose a design
The Design section lists the designs. The preview redraws as the real file.
- 3
Customize
Choose Customize design and document info… to open the designer. Changes show in the preview as you make them; choose Save as new… to keep a design under your own name.
In the designer, each tab handles one part:
| Tab | What you set |
|---|---|
| Cover | Whether there is a cover, its background, and text, pictures such as your logo, shapes, lines and a table of the document’s details, each placed where you want it. |
| Page | Paper size and orientation, page color, margins and a page border. |
| Watermark | Text, color, size, opacity and angle. |
| Header & footer | Left, middle and right text and pictures, using placeholders like [[Guide_Title]] and Page [[Page]] of [[Pages]]. |
| Text & colors | The accent color and the text styles of the body and headings. |
| Steps | Step layout and number style, spacing and dividers, completion checkboxes, screenshot width, frame and shadow, and how notes look. |
| Sections | Which sections appear, in what order and which start on a new page. |
| Document info | The details of this guide as a document: number, revision, dates, owner, approver, SOP sections and sign-off. |
Your designs live under Settings → Documents & export, where you can edit them, delete them and import a design someone shared with you.
Turn a guide into an SOP#
A standard operating procedure is a guide with a document around it: who owns it, what version it is, why it exists, and who approved it. The Document info tab holds those details, saved with the guide.
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Document control | Document number, revision, effective date, department, owner and approver. |
| Purpose, Scope, Responsibilities, Definitions, Prerequisites | Free text. In Scope, start lines with - for bullets. |
| Revision history | A row for each revision: number, date, author and what changed. |
| Approval | The sign-off table: role, name and date. “Prepared by” and “Approved by” are there to start. |
Use the same fields anywhere as placeholders, such as [[Doc_Number]] in a footer. With Pro, sending the guide for review fills the revision, history and sign-off in for you: Get a guide approved.