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The Ninth Circuit's Appellate Lawyer Representatives maintain a Technical Guide to Working with PDF Documents (published November 23, 2020), and the binding requirements sit in Circuit Rule 25-5(d). This page condenses both — the Guide itself controls.
Your brief "must be generated from the original word processing file to permit the electronic version of the document to be searched and copied" — Cir. R. 25-5(d). PDFs created by scanning paper are prohibited except in limited situations; do not print your brief to paper and scan it. All documents submitted for electronic filing must be text-searchable, and the Guide states plainly: "The Clerk may reject your electronic filing if it is not OCR compliant." When a scan is unavoidable (e.g., a paper-only trial exhibit), scan at 300 dpi and run OCR — the Guide's own settings — because free OCR tools exist and Acrobat Pro is only one path.
Each PDF attached to a filing may not exceed 100 MB (Cir. R. 25-5(d)). The Guide's reduction path: File → Save as Other → Reduced Size PDF, then PDF Optimizer with an "Audit Space Usage" check if more is needed — compare sizes before and after. Scanning is called out again as the enemy: it creates file sizes that may be too large for the filing system and "often results in illegible documents".
The Guide lists the content CM/ECF will bounce:
Bookmarks are not required for briefs, addenda or excerpts — but the Court "strongly encourages" them, judges comment on their helpfulness, and labels should be descriptive ("Lack of jurisdiction", not truncated headings), nested to mirror the document's structure. Structural rules with rejection consequences: the brief, required certificates and any appendix are submitted as one document; each Excerpts of Record volume is its own document with no volume over 300 pages (including the cover); multi-volume sets are numbered consecutively across volumes; a separate index volume carries the table of contents; sealed material goes in a separate final volume.
Personal identifiers must be redacted from public filings (Fed. R. App. P. 25(a)(5), Fed. R. Civ. P. 5.2). The Guide's warning applies everywhere: do not redact by changing text color to white or covering text with a black highlighter box — the text remains copyable. Redact in the word processor, or in a PDF editor's redaction tool with Apply actually run.