Guides
Longer answers to the questions behind the tools — written from how PDFs actually behave, hedges included. If a guide and your court’s local rules ever disagree, the rules win.
- Bates numbering, explained: formats, conventions and a clean workflow
What Bates numbers are, the prefix and digit conventions that keep document productions sortable, and a practical stamping workflow — compiled July 2026.
- Flattening PDFs for court e-filing: what courts actually require
Why e-filing systems reject PDFs with active form fields, what "flatten" really means, and how to flatten without bloating your filing — checked July 2026.
- Scanning double-sided pages on a single-sided scanner (and fixing the PDF)
The flip-and-rescan technique, why the second pass comes out backwards, and how to interleave the two PDFs into perfect reading order.
- What your PDF reveals about you: metadata, history and hidden layers
PDFs quietly carry author names, software versions, edit history and sometimes "deleted" content. What's in there, how to check, and how to strip it.
- Why is my PDF so large? A look inside the file
Where PDF file size actually comes from — image DPI math, fonts, metadata, incremental saves — and which parts compression can honestly fix.
- Why your PDF rotation doesn't stick (view rotation vs. saved rotation)
Rotate a PDF, reopen it, and it's sideways again? The rotate button in most viewers changes your view, not the file. Here's the difference and the fix.