The Fourth Circuit’s official technical guidance for its CM/ECF e-filing system states: “When using a PDF fillable form, the user must lock or ‘flatten’ the PDF document after completing the form fields to ensure the document can be viewed on all devices and to prevent other users from manipulating or editing the information.”
The court’s own instructions describe the print-to-PDF workaround (open the form, print it to a PDF printer, file the printed copy). Our flatten tool does the same thing in one step in your browser, and verifies that no interactive fields remain in the output.
Court rules are court-specific. Several other federal courts publish similar flattening guidance, but requirements, size caps, and procedures differ by court — always check the CM/ECF documentation of the specific court you are filing in.
One more warning from the same court page: redacting in Microsoft Word before converting to PDF can leave the redacted words recoverable. Redaction must be done with proper PDF redaction tools.