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Overview

Indolaw is a proof-of-concept open-source project that consists of 2 components:

a) A Python parser that coverts Indonesian law PDFs into a JSON representation that captures the semantic structure of the law (e.g a law is made of chapters, which are made of paragraphs, which are made of articles, etc.)

b) A Next.js front-end that renders the JSON representation of a law in HTML

Evaluation / Features

NOTE:

  • Demo GIFs below might take a while to load, please give it a little time
  • The UI is entirely in Indonesian, but for some of the demoes below I have utilized Chrome's Google Translation feature to show the UI in English so more people can follow along.

This approach provides a superior UX to traditional law PDFs for several reasons:

  1. Responsive: Rendered as HTML, the law is easier to read across all device sizes, especially mobile, as it is responsive. PDFs are particularly painful to read on mobile.

  1. Table of Contents:
  • Rather than having to first skim the whole PDF to get a sense of what will be covered in the law, the JSON representation extracts a table of contents & renders it as a sidebar. This allows users to quickly understand the law's structure.
  • Rather than CTRL+F-ing around in a PDF, users can use the table of contents sidebar to quickly hop between parts of the law

  1. URL Linking: Rendered as HTML, a user can link to a specific article (e.g http://hukumjelas.com/uu/1974/1#pasal-10 links to article 10 of Law 1 of 1974), which is not possible in PDF. This could enable better collaboration among lawyers, or allow journalists to highlight specific articles as they cover the legislative process.

  1. Copy/Paste: Often, law students or lawyers want to copy text from the PDF into an editor like MS Word, but copy/paste from the PDF into Word often leads to inconsistent formatting. This causes users to waste time cleaning up the formatting in their editor. Rendered as HTML, we ensure copy/paste is done in a format that MS Word and Google Docs understands.

  1. Side-by-Side Article & Commentary: In Indonesian laws, after all the articles are listed in the main body, there is an addendum with extended commentary/clarifications on the meaning of various articles. In the PDF, a user has to scroll back-and-forth between an article & its commentary. In the JSON representation, we semantically capture the location of an article & its associated commentary, so that in HTML we can show them side-by-side for easier reading.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by my experience taking US law classes while at Yale. Specifically, the existence of software with good UX that democratized access to laws - such as Oyez and Cornell LII - provided the initial spark.

Contributions

This project was built by Willem Chua, Melissa Lauw, and John Amadeo Daniswara (me).