How to create a bundle

BundleTool turns your PDFs into a court-ready bundle with a coversheet, an automatic index, consistent page numbering, bookmarks and internal links. Everything happens on your own device: no file is uploaded anywhere, and it works the same way offline. For a guided walk around the page itself, press the question mark in the header.

Prepare your documents

Have your documents ready as PDFs, or as JPG/PNG photos of exhibits, ideally in one folder. Naming files with their dates saves time later: BundleTool reads dates like Claim Form 2 June 2026.pdf or Witness Statement 2026-03-12.pdf straight from the filename.

Keep a single bundle under roughly 600 pages or 100 MB. Larger cases are usually split into volumes ("Bundle A", "Bundle B"), and BundleTool will warn you when a bundle is getting big.

Step 1: Basic Information

Enter the claim number, bundle title (for example "Trial Bundle") and case name. Tick Confidential to add a confidential marking, and set a Bundle Password if the finished PDF should require one to open.

Step 2: Select Documents

Click Add Documents, or drop files anywhere on the page. Photos of exhibits (JPG or PNG) become one-page PDFs automatically. A password-protected PDF asks for its password and is unlocked on your device. Files you have already added are recognised and not added twice. Use Add Section to group documents into named parts, such as "A: Applications" or "B: Witness Statements".

Add Coversheet opens the coversheet maker: fill in the court, the parties and the hearing details, watch the live preview, and use it as the bundle's front page. Every field is optional, the party labels can be changed (Claimant and Defendant rather than Applicant and Respondent), and the court, statute line and party labels are remembered for your next bundle. If you already have a front page, such as a firm letterhead, add your own instead as a PDF, JPG or PNG; only its first page is used, and a bundle never carries two covers.

Step 3: Review Table

Check the titles and dates BundleTool suggested, and click any of them to edit. Drag rows or sections to reorder them, or use the up/down arrows beside each one (they appear on hover or focus, and always on a phone), so dragging is never the only way. The column headings sort within sections; hold Shift and click to sort everything at once.

Step 4: Create Bundle

Create Bundle builds the finished PDF: coversheet, hyperlinked index, page numbers, bookmarks and printable right-hand page starts. If the bundle has no sections or no coversheet you are asked once, and can continue. Preview Index generates just the index so you can check it first. Finished bundles are kept in this browser behind the header's download icon, so you can re-download one without rebuilding it.

Emailing a bundle

Email services cap the whole message at about 25,000,000 bytes, and attachments grow by roughly 37% in transit, so about 18 MB of PDF is the most that reliably fits. When a bundle is bigger than that, Split for email (on the bundle-ready screen, or next to any finished bundle behind the header's download icon) divides it into parts that each fit. Documents are never split across parts unless a single document is itself over the limit, and each part can open with a "Bundle 1 of 3" page saying what it carries, or be left seamless so the parts print and stitch back together.

Autosave and rewind

Your work saves to this browser automatically; watch for the "Autosaved" note in the header. The clock icon rewinds to an earlier save. To reopen a finished bundle for editing later, just add its PDF like any other file: BundleTool recognises its own bundles and offers to open them, or to split their documents into the current table.

Exporting and reusing a bundle's structure

The Templates button (in the header) saves everything except the documents themselves (section names, document titles and dates, and all your settings) as a small .json manifest. It never carries the PDFs, so a manifest on its own is not a bundle: to bring one back, drop the .json file together with the original PDFs in a single drag, with their filenames unchanged. This is the fastest way to rebuild the same bundle shape for a similar case, or to keep a template (a set of sections and a house style) ready to reuse. A manifest carries structure only, never a password.

Advanced Settings

Step 5 opens Advanced Settings: page size, fonts, date formats, numbering styles (including per-section Bates numbering for the Family Court and roman numerals for the front matter), the index heading, the footer's background box, its vertical offset and where its link jumps to, printable mode and interface preferences. Everything saves automatically as you change it.

At the foot of that panel, Profiles keeps five saved sets of settings (click a slot to load it, shift-click to wipe it), so a firm's house style and a particular court's requirements can each be one click away. Beside it, your settings become a short code you can send to a colleague, or show as a QR code for them to scan; pasting a code applies it in one step. A code carries settings only, never documents.

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