Florida ePortal PDF requirements, and how to meet them

What the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal is

The Florida Courts E-Filing Portal (myflcourtaccess.com) is the statewide system for filing documents with Florida's trial and appellate courts. Attorneys, process servers, court reporters, and self-represented litigants all submit through the same Portal, which routes each filing to the correct county clerk. There is no charge to register or to file electronically, though statutory filing fees still apply where they normally would.

Once you submit, a clerk reviews the filing. If the document does not meet the Portal's standards, the clerk can move it to the Pending Queue (often called the correction queue) and email you asking for the issue to be fixed and the filing resubmitted. That review step is exactly where a technically flawed PDF gets caught.

What the Portal requires of your PDF

The Portal's document standards follow Florida Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.520 (formerly 2.526). The requirements that trip up filers most often are these:

Text-searchable and printable. Documents must be filed in a format capable of being electronically searched and printed. A flat scan or a photographed page is an image with no text layer underneath, so it fails this test until it is run through OCR. This is the single most common technical defect.

Letter size, one inch margins. Documents should be on letter-size (8.5 by 11 inch) paper, printed on one side, with one-inch margins and pages numbered consecutively. Reducing a legal-size document to fit is prohibited — it must actually be letter size.

File size. A document uploaded through the Portal must stay within the 50MB file size limit. Anything larger has to be submitted outside the Portal through your local clerk. The standards also ask filers to upload each pleading or motion as its own file rather than combining several into one, which keeps individual files under the cap.

Scans at 300 DPI, black and white. OCR-scanned documents should be at 300 DPI, and black-and-white (non-color) documents are preferred. Very high-resolution color scans are a frequent cause of oversized files.

Unencrypted. A document the clerk (and the Portal's conversion step) must be able to open cannot be locked. Password protection and embedded user IDs are not compatible with how the Portal stores documents.

Where PDF/A fits — and what docu does and does not do

Florida has adopted PDF/A (the archival PDF standard) as its preferred format, with PDF/A-2a named as the target. This is where filers get anxious, so here is the honest version.

You do not have to convert your own document to PDF/A to file. The Portal explicitly continues to accept regular PDF and Word files, and it converts them to PDF/A on its side when the clerk's system is ready to store that format. If you submit a document that is not PDF/A, the Portal may show an informational message, but that alone does not stop your filing.

docu does not produce PDF/A output, and we will never tell you it does. What docu does is prepare a clean, standards-compliant PDF that the Portal can convert cleanly — which matters more than it sounds. When the Portal receives a searchable PDF, it converts it to PDF/A and keeps your text. When it receives a non-searchable (image-only) PDF, it rasterizes the file into a bitmap PDF/A, and your document stays unsearchable forever. Running OCR before you file is what keeps your text intact through that conversion.

The same logic covers the rest. PDF/A prohibits live form fields, JavaScript, and encryption — so flattening your form fields, removing scripts, and starting from an unencrypted file all make your document convert without losing content or getting kicked back. docu handles each of those steps.

One limit to be clear about: if your PDF is encrypted or password-protected, docu does not strip the protection. You will need to obtain an unencrypted original — for a document you created, re-export it without a password; for one you received locked, ask the sender for an open copy.

Why filings land in the correction queue

When a clerk moves your filing to the Pending Queue, the email rarely spells out the technical cause. In practice, the recurring reasons are the ones above: the document is not text-searchable, it is not letter size, it is too large to upload, it still has interactive form fields, or it will not open because it is locked. Document-naming and category-selection mistakes send filings to the correction queue too, but those are choices you make in the Portal, not defects inside the PDF.

docu addresses the PDF-side problems. Before you resubmit, it is worth confirming the file itself is clean so you are not bounced a second time for a different reason.

How docu fixes a Florida filing

Everything below happens in your browser. Your document is never uploaded to a server, and the free check tells you which of these apply before you commit to anything.

1. 1Open docu and drop in the PDF the Portal rejected — it is processed on your device, not sent anywhere.
2. 2Run OCR so the document becomes text-searchable, which the Portal requires and which survives its PDF/A conversion.
3. 3Resize pages to 8.5 by 11 Letter so the document meets the letter-size standard.
4. 4Flatten any form fields so the file has no live fields for the Portal to reject.
5. 5Compress the file if it is over the 50MB upload limit, and strip metadata and remove embedded scripts to leave a clean document.
6. 6Download the repaired PDF, review docu's compliance summary, and resubmit through the Portal.