Courts reject bad scans by name. Illinois' rejection standards table includes "Document incomplete, illegible, unreadable, or completely blank" — and the clerk's own example comments include "Scan is not dark enough." The AOIC's e-filing tips are more specific still: poorly scanned, illegible or improperly aligned PDFs will be rejected — upside down, blank, or bleed-through pages named outright.
| Source | Rule |
|---|---|
| NY AD1 specification | Scans at 300 DPI, black and white only unless color protects evidentiary value; filers responsible for legibility |
| Ninth Circuit guide | Scan at 300 dpi and OCR; downsampling OCR output to 300 dpi recommended |
| Tyler-portal guidance | Resolutions exceeding 300 dpi create files large enough to be rejected — scan black-and-white or grayscale at 300 dpi |
Read together: 300 dpi is a band, not a floor. Under it, text degrades past legibility and OCR accuracy collapses; over it, file size balloons toward the limits (NY's 100 MB auto-reject; the Ninth Circuit's 100 MB cap). Avoid "smallest file size" export settings at both ends — they strip fonts and text layers.
A scan is a picture until OCR runs; every court that accepts scans expects searchable text (the Ninth Circuit may reject filings that aren't OCR-compliant; NY AD1 requires all PDFs text-searchable). The sequence that survives: scan at 300 dpi → fix orientation and contrast before OCR → run OCR → Ctrl+F a known word to verify → check size and page dimensions. And remember the ordering: OCR applied to a skewed, faint scan bakes the defects into the text layer.