How the PDF viewer behaves when an exhibit is up

Follow one document from disk to screen and the shape of the app becomes clear.

Import. Say a scanned 180-page chart arrives as one PDF. Drop it on the exhibit list and it becomes an exhibit with a number, a name, a description and a status. If a cleaner scan turns up later, the replace-PDF action swaps the file underneath the exhibit you already built. Status reads as a word beside the exhibit: Not offered, Offered, Admitted, Rejected or Illustrative.

Prepare. Open the exhibit and the viewer takes the window, with a thumbnail strip, the page itself, and the markup tools. Whatever you draw here is what appears on the court's display later, so preparation and presentation are one object. The tools are covered in how to annotate exhibits in court.

Present. Press Present and the surrounding interface disappears. The page you were sitting on is the page the room receives.

The reading view scrolls continuously, so a document behaves like a document rather than a slide deck: you drift from page 14 into page 15 without a click. A thumbnail panel handles coarse movement, the usual way to reach the signature page of a long agreement.

Pages are rendered on demand instead of all at once, which is the difference between a 600-page production opening in a moment and a laptop grinding while you apologize to the bench.

Zoom has four controls. Plus and minus step in and out. Fit page drops the whole sheet on screen, which suits photographs; fit width pushes text to the edges, which suits dense paragraphs. Page jump takes a number and lands on it, and Settings sets the zoom mode a document opens in. The keys are the same in the reading view and in presentation, as set out on keyboard navigation.

Most of the real work in front of a jury is moving between two scales. The whole page establishes what the document is; the paragraph establishes what it says.

The pattern that works: bring the page up whole, press W so the body text grows to the edges, then plus once or twice if the scan is soft. Scroll to the passage while the witness finds it on paper, and press F to bring the full page back when the answer is done.

Highlighting in advance makes this steadier: a highlight drawn the night before is already there when you zoom, and boxes and arrows hold position too. What you cannot do is create markup live, because presentation mode does not allow editing.

Cross-examination rarely follows the order of your exhibit list. An answer makes the invoice relevant three questions early, and you need it up now.

Press E in presentation and an exhibit switcher opens. Type the exhibit number, or part of the name if the number is not what you have in your head, press Enter, and that exhibit takes the screen. You stay in the fullscreen view rather than picking through a file list while the room waits.

This is the argument for naming exhibits in a way you can type under pressure: Purchase order 4471 beats a name built from a file path and a date stamp. A starting structure is in the trial exhibit index template.

Some of the value is in what is missing. Nothing can be edited in presentation, so no keystroke scribbles on an exhibit in front of a jury.

Markup is also stored separately from the document. The PDF you imported is not rewritten or flattened, so your exhibits still match the copies served on everyone else. The visual redaction overlay, drawn on top rather than burned in, is a black box for presentation only: it does not remove the underlying content from the PDF file, and Exhibit Room does not do permanent redaction, so a file that must leave your hands genuinely redacted is handled elsewhere. The same point is on visual redaction.

Two absences matter. There is no text search inside a PDF and no OCR, so finding a phrase is preparation work, and import accepts PDFs only. The step-by-step sequence is in how to present a PDF in court.