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Affidavi vs. Adobe Acrobat for court records
Most Ontario litigators build their court records by hand in Adobe Acrobat or a similar PDF editor. Acrobat is a general-purpose PDF editor; Affidavi is built for one job — turning an affidavit, a motion record or an Affidavit of Documents into the hyperlinked, bookmarked, portal-safe PDF the court expects. This page compares the work, task by task.
| Task | By hand in Acrobat | With Affidavi |
|---|---|---|
| Combining the affidavit and its exhibits | Insert the exhibit files in order, make a cover page for each exhibit in Word, insert those too, then check the lettering by eye. | Drop the affidavit and the loose files together. Affidavi finds the affidavit, reads each exhibit reference, letters and places every file, and generates the covers. |
| Linking exhibit references | For every "Exhibit A" in the body: draw a link rectangle, choose "Go to a page view", navigate to the exhibit, set the destination. Repeat for every reference, and again after any change. | Every reference is found and linked to its exhibit in one pass; every exhibit carries a back button to the paragraph that cited it. Re-assemble the record and the links are rebuilt, not broken. |
| Bookmarks | Type each bookmark by hand and drag it into place. | Built from the record's own structure: the affidavit, each exhibit, each tab. |
| Motion and application records | Build the index in Word, insert tab pages, type the page numbers, then redo the numbers whenever a document is added or removed. | Numbered tabs, an index whose numbers always match, and hyperlinks from each index row to its tab. |
| Affidavit of Documents | Type Schedule A, then build a separate productions brief and number it to match. | Schedule A is the index: every row links to its tab and every tab links back to the schedule. Photographs, native files and oversized documents get slip sheets that keep the numbering intact. |
| Redaction | Acrobat's Redact tool removes content once it is applied. The common failure is a box drawn with the comment or drawing tools instead, which hides the text on screen and leaves it in the file. | True redaction: the content is removed from the file, and the finished output is independently read back to confirm the values are gone. An output that cannot be verified is set aside. |
| Case Center limits | Count pages against the 500-page cap, split the file by hand, rename it to the naming convention, and check the size before upload. | A filing profile for the court applies the caps, names the file portal-safe and splits volumes automatically. If a file would not comply, it is not emitted. |
| Where the work happens | On your computer with desktop Acrobat; some Acrobat features use Adobe's cloud services. | On your computer, always. There is no document cloud and no account that can browse your matters. |
| Time for a 40-exhibit affidavit | Hours of rectangle drawing, repeated every time the record changes. | Minutes, and the same minutes again after a change. |
When you still want Acrobat
Affidavi is not a general PDF editor. Free-form text editing, form filling, e-signing, page-level touch-ups and everything else you use a PDF editor for stay where they are. The record Affidavi builds is an ordinary PDF: open it in Acrobat, Preview or any viewer, and edit it there if you need to. The two are not exclusive — Affidavi does the assembly, linking, redaction and filing checks; your PDF editor does the rest.
Why the difference matters in Ontario
The Superior Court's Case Center guidance describes usable materials as one PDF, text-searchable, bookmarked and hyperlinked, within the page cap and named to the convention. In Basaraba v Bridal Image Inc., 2021 ONSC 8038, a motion was dismissed with missing hyperlinks cited as reason enough on their own. Building that record by hand is possible; it is the repetition — every reference, every bookmark, every time the record changes — that the software removes. The hyperlinking guide walks through the manual steps if you want to compare them yourself.
What Affidavi costs
Solo and Firm plans are on the pricing page, in Canadian dollars, with a 14-day free trial of every feature. You keep whatever PDF viewer or editor you already use.
The tedious parts of motion practice, handled.
Affidavi sorts, hyperlinks, redacts and files — entirely on your Mac or PC, never uploaded. Launching soon for macOS and Windows with a 14-day free trial.
See pricing & get notifiedSources: SCJ: How to Organize & Upload Documents · Basaraba v Bridal Image Inc., 2021 ONSC 8038 · See also: how to choose motion record software
Adobe and Acrobat are trademarks of Adobe Inc. Affidavi is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. Descriptions of the manual workflow reflect the general steps in a desktop PDF editor and may differ by version. General information, not legal advice.