removing hyperlinks from PDFs for court filings

Some courts will not allow PDFs to be electronically filed which contain hyperlinks. This can really become a problem if you have PDFs with many pages and a url has been added to the footer for each page, as is common with PDFs created from SEC filings found on EDGAR.

Printing out the PDF as a hard copy and photo scanning is too much of a hassle, and there may not be time to go back and redo the PDFs without the footers containing the urls - or urls could be scattered in the body of the document. Removing links in EDIT mode may also be too time consuming.

Flattening a PDF by writing it to a new PDF will not necessarily remove hyperlinks in the PDF, and hyperlinks can still be present when a conversion to PDF/A format is performed.

The Acrobat tool which will remove web links . . .

. . . will not take out all hyperlinked web addresses:

Going under Preferences in Acrobat and unselecting 'Create links from URLs' in the Documents category will only deactivate hyperlinks for the current user of the PDF - not recipients you forward it to.

Instead try converting the PDF to a multipage TIFF image using an editor like FoxIT. (Acrobat will not convert a PDF to the multipage TIFF format.) This software has an option to export the PDF as a multipage TIFF image. When saving the file click on Settings and set the conversion type to 'Single File'.

You can then open the PDF back up in Acrobat which will reformat it as a PDF. The formatting will be retained but the links will no longer be active.

PACER's One Free Look

Parties that appear on the official email notice list for cases filed in the federal district courts, get one free look at PDFs of filings by any party on PACER. The standard PACER charge is 10 cents per page with a maximum of $3.00 for filings other than transcripts. The District Court for the Northern District of Ohio has a posting on its site which describes how a party can ensure that it gets its one free look, and bypass the PACER login.

1. The filing must be accessed by a registered ECF user through an email generated by the ECF system.

2. The filing must be accessed within 15 days after it is filed with the court.

3. If the user receives a blank screen, it's recommended that the Internet Preferences be changed in Adobe Reader, unchecking 'Display PDF in browser' and 'Allow fast web view'.

4. In the Utilities section for an ECF account, under 'Maintain Your ECF Account' you can enter a secondary email, if your firm's network blocks access to the free look.

PACER for Free?

A bill currently before the House of Representatives, Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018, H.R. 6714, 115th Cong. (2018), proposes that the Case Management / Electronic Case Files system for the federal courts be consolidated, and states be given the option of participating in the new system.

The bill introduced by Representative Doug Collins of Georgia would make filings on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system available to the public free of charge at least five days after they were filed. The bill also requires that all documents be text searchable and 'machine readable'. The provision for machine readable documents apparently contemplates court filings being in the XML, HTML, or JSON formats which a browser or software can analyze and prepare tables of content or outlines from.

The bill would also allow external web sites to link directly to PACER filings. Would this allow for links to PACER filings to be added more easily than it currently possible with LinkBuilder? See the Tip of the Night for December 1, 2016.

Audio and visual filing are also to be posted to the new system, and "]t]he system shall provide search functions for public use". Hopefully in the future we'll have the option to run Boolean searches across all documents filed with the federal courts.