Scanning and PDF quality for trial exhibits

Three hundred dots per inch is the sensible default for documents. It captures small print, survives the zooming you will do in court, and keeps files manageable. Two hundred dpi is acceptable for clean typed text and nothing else. Below that, thin strokes break up and a signature starts to look like a smudge.

Go higher for a reason, not by habit. Handwriting, carbon copies, engineering drawings, fine detail in a photograph and anything you expect to enlarge hard are the cases for four hundred or six hundred dpi. A twelve-page contract at six hundred dpi is simply a slower file with no visible benefit.

One thing resolution cannot do is add information that was never captured. Rescanning a bad photocopy at six hundred dpi produces a large, sharp picture of a bad photocopy. If the original is available, go back to it.

Black and white, meaning one bit per pixel, is the setting that causes the most trouble. It discards yellow highlighter entirely, drops faint stamps and pencil annotations, and turns gray fax shading into a solid block. Since a highlighted passage is often the reason the document is in the case, that loss matters.

Grayscale is a safe general choice for text, and color is right for photographs, for anything with colored ink, for colored stamps, and for documents where a highlight is part of the point. Signatures in blue ink are worth capturing in color simply because the contrast with a photocopy is sometimes the argument.

File size is the trade, and it is usually worth paying. A hundred-page exhibit in color at three hundred dpi is still a file a laptop opens without complaint.

Optical character recognition turns a picture of text into text a computer can search. It is worth running on your exhibit set, because it makes documents searchable in your review platform, in your PDF tool and in the operating system's own search while you are preparing.

Do that work in the tool that already handles your productions, whether that is the scanner software, your document review system or a general PDF application. Be plain about the limit here: Exhibit Room does not perform OCR and does not search text inside PDFs. It opens the PDF you give it, so any searchable text layer has to be added before import.

Two cautions. Recognition quality follows scan quality, so a poor scan produces poor text and a false sense of searchability. And recognition never changes what the page looks like, so it is not a fix for a document that is hard to read.

Look at every page after scanning. Upside-down sheets, ninety-degree rotations on landscape pages, and pages that arrived in the feeder backward are extremely common and take seconds to fix at the desk. In court they cost a visible pause while somebody rotates the view.

Mixed page sizes inside one exhibit are worth normalizing where you can, because a set that jumps between letter and legal looks unsteady when it is paged through on screen. Landscape material such as a spreadsheet or a plan drawing should be rotated to read the correct way up rather than left for the presenter to deal with live.

Deskew crooked pages, but do not crop. Cropping removes margins that carry Bates numbers, exhibit stamps and handwritten notes, and an exhibit whose production number has been trimmed off is a problem you cannot fix at counsel table. See Bates number for why that margin matters.

Compression is where good scans go to die. Aggressive JPEG settings produce halos around letterforms and gray mottling in white space, which become obvious under courtroom zoom. Prefer a moderate compression setting at three hundred dpi over a heavy one at six hundred; the second is a bigger file and a worse picture.

Size matters mostly for handling. A very large single PDF is slower to copy, slower to email and more awkward to back up. Exhibit Room renders pages on demand, so a several-hundred-page volume opens and scrolls without waiting for the whole file, but that is not a reason to present from a thousand-page production.

Split by exhibit. One exhibit, one PDF, is the rule that keeps everything else simple, and it is also how the software expects the set to arrive since each exhibit holds exactly one file. Split long production volumes into the individual documents you will actually offer, name them with the exhibit number first, and keep the full volume archived separately. How to organize trial exhibits covers the folder structure around that.

Do one deliberate pass over the finished set. Open each exhibit, confirm the page count matches the Bates range, look at the first page, the last page and one page in the middle at one hundred percent zoom, and check the orientation throughout.

Print two or three at random. Paper reveals faint scans that a bright laptop screen flatters, and you are printing bench copies anyway.

Then import and look again on the machine you will present from, at the zoom level you will use. A document that is legible in the office at full brightness is not necessarily legible on a projector in a room with windows; courtroom laptop setup covers testing that.