everyday mac tools

Get a PDF ready for court e-filing on a Mac

· 7 min read

Court filing systems reject PDFs for a handful of predictable reasons: scanned pages with no searchable text, a password or security setting, form fields that are still live, a file over the size limit, or personal details that should have been redacted. Read your court’s electronic filing requirements first, since the details vary, then work through the checks below on your Mac before you upload. Most of them take a minute in Preview.

Read the court’s rules before you touch the file

Every court that accepts electronic filing publishes its requirements, usually in its local rules, a filing manual or administrative procedures on its website. Before you prepare anything, look for:

  • the maximum size of a single upload, and what to do with exhibits that exceed it
  • whether documents must be text-searchable
  • whether exhibits are filed as separate files or attached to the main document, and how files should be named
  • page size and orientation
  • whether bookmarks, hyperlinks or embedded files are expected, allowed or forbidden
  • what personal information must be redacted

The privacy rules deserve particular attention. In US federal courts, Rule 5.2 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and its counterparts in the criminal and bankruptcy rules, limits Social Security and taxpayer identification numbers and financial account numbers to their last four digits, birth dates to the year, and the names of minors to their initials. State courts have their own versions. If the rules leave a question open, the clerk’s office can usually tell you how it wants something filed.

Start from the original, not a scan

The cleanest filing PDF is made directly from the document you wrote. In Pages, choose File, Export To, PDF. In most other apps, choose File, Print, then open the PDF menu at the bottom of the print dialog and choose Save as PDF. Either way the text stays real text: searchable, selectable, and far smaller than a scanned page.

Printing a document and scanning it back in throws all of that away. Each page becomes a picture, the file grows, and a search by the court or the other side finds nothing.

To test a finished PDF, open it in Preview, press Command-F and search for a word from the middle of a page. If Preview finds it, the text is there. Exhibits that exist only on paper need text recognition; make a scanned PDF searchable on a Mac covers the options.

Remove passwords and restrictions

Filing systems commonly reject encrypted PDFs, and that includes files that open without a password but restrict printing, copying or editing. In Preview, choose Tools, Show Inspector, and open the tab with the lock icon, which reports whether the file is encrypted and what it restricts. If the file is protected, open it with its password and export an unprotected copy. Remove the password from a PDF you own walks through it step by step.

Flatten forms and signatures

A court form you filled in on the Mac may still contain live fields that anyone can edit, and a signature placed in Preview is an annotation sitting on top of the page. Some filing systems reject live fields, and others accept the file but display it differently from what you saw. Flattening turns fields and annotations into ordinary page content. Fill in a PDF form on a Mac and flatten it shows how, and sign a PDF on a Mac explains when a drawn signature is acceptable and when a court expects something else.

Get under the size limit

When a file is over the limit, splitting usually beats squeezing.

  1. Split by exhibit. Courts that cap upload size generally expect large exhibits in parts. Split at natural breaks and name each part clearly. Split a PDF into separate files on a Mac has the steps.
  2. Rescan sensibly. Text pages scanned in color at the scanner’s highest setting are much larger than they need to be. Black and white or grayscale, at the resolution the court suggests, is usually enough.
  3. Compress with care. Preview’s Reduce File Size filter is blunt and can leave scanned text unreadable. Compress a PDF on a Mac without wrecking the scans explains gentler routes.

Check the result in Finder with Get Info (Command-I) rather than trusting an estimate in a save dialog.

Redact properly, then prove it

A black rectangle drawn over a number hides it on screen and leaves the number in the file, where search, copy and paste bring it straight back. Why a black box on a PDF does not redact anything explains the failure, and how to check whether a PDF was really redacted gives the tests. At a minimum, search the final file for each redacted value, and copy a redacted area and paste it into TextEdit to see what comes through.

PDFs also carry things you cannot see on the page: author names and earlier titles in the metadata, attached files, hidden layers. What a PDF still hides lists them and how to clear them.

A final check before you upload

Open the finished file fresh and go through this list:

  1. It opens with no password prompt.
  2. A search finds text on a page in every section and exhibit.
  3. The page count matches what you expect, and every page is upright and in order.
  4. The file size, in Get Info, is under the court’s limit.
  5. Searching for each redacted value finds nothing.
  6. The file name follows the court’s convention.

Keep the filed version separate from your working copy, so you can always show exactly what was submitted.

Doing it all in one place

Basalt is a native Mac PDF app that puts these steps in one window and runs them on the Mac, with nothing uploaded. Make Searchable adds text recognition to scans, Compress shrinks the file, Merge and Split handle exhibits, Passwords adds or removes protection, Forms fills and locks forms, Bates Numbers stamps pages, and Inspect shows what a PDF still hides. Its Redact tool removes the text and images under each mark rather than covering them, and before any file is written a verifier re-opens the export with an independent parser to prove the redacted strings are gone. Procedures saves a repeatable set of steps, which helps when every filing goes through the same preparation. Every tool writes a new file and leaves the original untouched. Basalt runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, is free for 24 hours with every tool, then costs $29 for a lifetime license covering up to three Macs.

Questions

Should exhibits go in one file or several? Whatever your court’s rules say. When they are silent, ask the clerk’s office, because practice differs from one court to the next.

Do I need to redact details the other side already knows? The privacy rules apply to what is filed, because the filing becomes part of the court record, whoever already knows the information. Check the rules for the exemptions they list.