How to Convert a Word Pleading Into a Court-Compliant PDF

Most pleadings start life as a Word document, and most advocates assume that hitting "Save As PDF" at the end is a formality. It isn't always. PDF export can shift margins by a fraction of an inch, substitute a font that isn't installed on the machine doing the exporting, or leave headers and footers misaligned in ways that aren't obvious until you compare the PDF against the practice direction it's meant to satisfy. Here's the process that actually gets a Word pleading to a genuinely court-compliant PDF, not just a PDF that looks fine at a glance.

Step 1: Set the formatting in Word before you draft, not after

Set your page size, margins, font, and line spacing to match the court you're filing with before you start typing, not as a cleanup pass at the end. For the High Court's 2022 directions, that's A4 paper, 1.5" top and bottom margins, 1.75" left margin, Times New Roman, Arial, or Century Gothic at size 12, fully justified, with 1.5 line spacing. The Supreme Court and Court of Appeal have their own specifications. Formatting a document correctly from the start avoids the more error-prone process of reformatting a document that's already full of content.

Step 2: Turn off tracked changes and remove comments

Before exporting, make sure Track Changes is turned off and accepted, and that any review comments are deleted, not just hidden. A PDF exported from a Word document with unresolved tracked changes can carry over strikethrough text, comment markers, or revision balloons that have no place in a filed pleading. This is a five-second check that prevents an embarrassing and entirely avoidable mistake.

Step 3: Export using "Save As PDF," not "Print to PDF"

Use Word's native Save As (or Export) function to create the PDF, rather than printing to a PDF driver. Word's own PDF export preserves embedded fonts, real (searchable, selectable) text, and internal document structure more reliably than a generic print-to-PDF pathway, which can sometimes rasterize text into images depending on the driver. A pleading with real text is also what makes automated line and page numbering possible afterward, since that numbering is calculated from the actual text layout on the page, not guessed from a flattened image.

Step 4: Check the exported PDF against the original, side by side

Open the exported PDF next to the Word document and check:

• Margins look the same, not shifted
• The font rendered correctly (not substituted, which can happen if the exact font isn't installed on the machine used for export)
• Page breaks landed where expected, especially around headings and signature blocks
• Headers and footers, if any, are positioned correctly and not overlapping body text

This step catches the majority of conversion issues before they become a registry problem. It takes a minute and it's worth doing every time, not just for documents that "look complicated."

Step 5: Apply page numbering and tenthlining if required

Once you've confirmed the PDF matches your Word draft, add the numbering the applicable practice direction requires. Page numbering position (top right or bottom right, depending on the court) and, for the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, or a High Court Record of Appeal, every-tenth-line margin numbering, should be applied to the finished PDF rather than attempted inside Word itself. Word doesn't have a reliable native way to number every tenth line of running text in the margin, which is exactly the kind of formatting requirement that's easier to get right with a tool built for it. Tenthliner takes the verified PDF from Step 4 and applies court-matched numbering without touching the underlying text, so the content you already checked stays exactly as it was.

Step 6: Do one last check on the numbered output

After numbering is applied, open the final PDF once more and confirm the page numbers and line numbers landed where you expect, and that nothing in the original text shifted. This should be a formality if Steps 1 through 5 were followed correctly, but it's the last checkpoint before the document leaves your hands, so it's worth the thirty seconds.

Why this order matters

Formatting in Word first, converting carefully, and numbering last keeps each step focused on one problem at a time. Trying to fix margins after conversion, or trying to count line numbers by hand inside a PDF viewer, is where most of the avoidable errors happen. Handling the draft, the conversion, and the numbering as three distinct, checked steps is what actually produces a document that's ready to file the first time.

For the underlying formatting rules behind each court, see the breakdowns for the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and High Court. For the numbering step itself, see How to Number Every Tenth Line in a PDF Without Retyping.