How to Tenthline a Legal Document in Under 5 Minutes

Every step below happens on Tenthliner. There's no manual line-counting, no repositioning text boxes, and nothing to redo if the document gets edited afterward. Have your document and about five minutes, and you're done.

If you want the background on why this rule exists before you dive in, that's covered in What Is Tenthlining and Why Kenyan Courts Require It.

What you need before you start

• The document itself: a native PDF, a scanned PDF, or a scanned handwritten document all work.
• A Tenthliner account. Sign-up is free, and it comes with 50 credits(50 pages), no card required.
• To know which court you're filing in, since the formatting rules differ slightly between the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and High Court.

That's the whole list. You don't need special software, a template, or a paralegal to check your margins by hand.

Step 1: Create your account

Head to Tenthliner and register (or continue with Google). You get 50 free credits on sign-up, and processing costs 1 credit per page, so a typical affidavit or pleading costs a handful of credits, not a subscription commitment.

Step 2: Upload your document

On the upload page, you can process up to 10 files at once, up to 50MB each. Drag your file into the upload area or click Browse Files. Tenthliner accepts native digital PDFs, scanned documents, and scanned handwritten filings the same way, so it doesn't matter how the original was produced.

Step 3: Pick your court's format

This is the step that actually saves you the most time. Instead of manually setting fonts, margins, and line numbering to match a specific court's practice directions, use the Quick Presets bar and tap the court you're filing in:

• Court of Appeal
• High Court
• Supreme Court
• Custom, if you pick a specific combination of settings that doesn't match a standard preset

Each preset applies the font, page numbering position, and tenth-line margin numbering that court's practice directions require, in one tap. The document settings panel lets you set the font (Helvetica or Times New Roman), the line color (red or black), the page number position (top right or bottom right), and whether pagination is switched on, individually.

Step 4: Start tenthlining

Click Start Tenthlining. For a single document, this takes seconds or milliseconds; for a batch of multiple PDFs, a progress bar shows which file is being processed and how far through the batch you are. You don't need to stay on the page babysitting it; the status updates as each document finishes.

Step 5: Download and file

Once processing completes, you get two files:

• The processed PDF, correctly tenthlined and ready to file, which often downloads to your browser automatically.
• A receipt, a separate document confirming what was processed and when, useful if you need to show the formatting was done correctly.

If the automatic download doesn't appear, the Download PDF button on the document card gets you the same file. From there, the document is ready to upload through The Judiciary of Kenya E-Filing System exactly as it is: no further editing, no realigning line numbers, no risk of the numbering shifting because you touched the text afterward.

Why this beats doing it manually

The honest comparison isn't "five minutes versus five minutes done differently." It's five minutes versus the hour or more it takes to manually place line numbers down a margin in Word or Adobe, get them right on every page, and then redo all of it the moment someone asks for a small wording change. Manual formatting also has to be re-checked by eye before every filing, since there's no way to verify hundreds of line numbers are still aligned after an edit without reading the whole document again.

The five-minute version doesn't get slower as the document gets longer or more heavily edited. A 200-page record of appeal takes the same five steps as a two-page affidavit.

If something doesn't look right

Two things are worth checking before you upload the result:

• You picked the right court preset. The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and High Court requirements are similar but not identical, and using the wrong preset means re-processing with the correct one.
• The source document was legible. For scanned or handwritten filings, a low-quality scan can affect how cleanly the tool reads the original document. A clearer scan gives a cleaner result the first time.

If you're still unsure whether a specific document meets a specific court's exact requirements, What Is Tenthlining and Why Kenyan Courts Require It has the full citation-by-citation breakdown for each court.

Try Tenthliner free: 50 credits, no card needed.