Preparing to eFile To create your documents, you'll need a word processing application, such as Microsoft Word, a PDF printer driver, and a scanner. For most documents you will prepare them in a word processor and then print them to PDF. Use this process to create your motions, pleadings, and other lead documents. Some documents, such as exhibits you will scan in. You should make sure your scanner is set to Black and White with a low resolution of 300 dpi. DPI stands for dots per inch. If your scanner can output to PDF use that format, however most scanners default format is TIFF. These TIFF images do not get time stamped so you should use this format only for exhibits that do not need to be time stamped. For Proposed Orders or Summons you will submit these documents in Microsoft Word 2003 or RTF format. These documents will not be time stamped by the efile system and will be handled separately.
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a popular format created by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Documents using this format can be read using the Adobe Reader, a free application available from the Adobe website. This type of document is considered a final form document because it is not easily edited. The format is designed to appear the same on nearly every machine using Adobe Reader and on multiple operating systems. Because the document looks the same regardless of the machine, this is the preferred foratm. A PDF document has the extension .pdf appended to the filename, for example, sample.pdf.
If you have the Adobe Acrobat Standard Edition installed on your computer, you can create PDF documents directly from
Microsoft Word by selecting the PDF printer driver. Some word processing applications, such as Corel WordPerfect,
come with their own PDF printer drivers. If you do not have a PDF printer driver there are many companies now that sell inexpensive PDF printer drivers.
Many times you will need to include paper documents such as a copy of a contract, a copy of a bounced check, or some other item in your submission. You must scan these types of paper exhibits into an electronic format such as TIFF or PDF. To do this you must have access to a scanner. Pay attention to court requirements for file size, color, and resolution. Most courts will reject your submission if you include images that are too larger. For example many small consumer scanners are designed to scan photos. These scanners are set to high color resolutions. Scanning with these settings will create documents that are 1 Megabyte per page. This is too large. Scanning using black and white with the resolution set to 300 dpi result in pages that are 25-40 KB in size. Using color adds to the size of the file, so you should only scan using color settings when color is a vital element of the exhibit. See your scanner's user documentation for more information.
The court has established a 2 MB limit for each document. Generally, a 200 page document
saved as a PDF document in black
and white will be less that 2 MB if the document does not have any images, such
as pictures or graphs.
You can include as many documents as you need; however, there are size limitations. Each document should not be more than 2 Megabytes and the total submission cannot be more than 16 Megabytes. When you add a document in the 'Add a Document' page, the size of each document and the total size will display.
If you have created a document in Microsoft Word that is about 200 pages in length without images, and you use a PDF printer driver, to create your PDF document you can expect about a 2 Megabyte PDF document. When images are added the size increases quickly. If you documents are greater than 2 MB, you will need to split the document into smaller files. When you have these documents broken down you can add them as separate documents and using the additional text field in the 'Add a Document' page a short description such as "part two of motion".