Since 2020 the Supreme Court, and after it a run of High Courts, have required filings on A4 with a fixed font, size, line spacing and margins, and a draft written in Word's defaults meets none of them. Open a .docx here, pick the court, and the page rewrites the page setup and the type, sets quotations and indented matter in the smaller single-spaced size the rules ask for, and shows what it found and what it changed. The file is read and rewritten in this browser tab and is not uploaded anywhere.
1. Document
An older .doc, or a PDF, has to be saved as .docx first. A PDF cannot be reformatted at all: its lines are already broken, so changing the font or the spacing would mean re-typesetting it.
2. Court
The font has to be installed on the computer that opens and prints the file, or Word substitutes another one. All three are free.
3. Options
What the document has now
Open a .docx to see its page size, margins, fonts and spacing against the rule.
What this cannot do
- Paper weight and printing on both sides are instructions to whoever prints the file. They are listed in the result so they are not forgotten.
- Pagination, indexing, the synopsis and list of dates, and the order of the paper book are governed by each court's own rules and practice directions, and are not touched.
- Text in tables takes the same font, size and spacing as the body. Footnotes, headers and footers take the new typeface and keep their own sizes, because none of these rules sets one for them.
- Open the result in Word and read it before filing. A reformatted document is longer, and a page break or a table that sat well at the old size may not at the new one.