Pagination and indexing of the paper book
Pagination & Indexing of the SLP Paper Book
Pagination and indexing sound trivial, yet they are among the most common reasons an SLP paper book is marked defective. The Supreme Court's own e-Committee has even published a programme for paginating paper books — a measure of how much friction this step causes.
This guide covers the rules and the practical trap that makes manual pagination so painful.
Why it matters
The index is how the Bench and the Registry locate any document in the file. If pagination is broken or the index points to the wrong page, the paper book fails its basic purpose — and the Registry will say so.
The rules in brief
- Pagination runs continuously across the whole paper book.
- Later pleadings (replies, counters, rejoinders) are paginated in continuation.
- Every annexure is indexed and paginated, and must be a true copy of the original.
- The index must reconcile exactly with the page on which each document actually sits.
The circular-dependency trap
Here is why manual pagination is so error-prone: the cover page and index must state page numbers, but you only know the final page numbers once every document has been laid out and converted. Any late edit — adding an annexure, a longer synopsis — shifts every subsequent page, forcing you to re-number and rebuild the index by hand.
Automated, two-pass pagination
A two-pass approach removes the trap: first lay out and convert every document, then count the pages and inject the exact numbers into the cover page and index before merging everything into a single PDF. This is precisely the mechanical work software can do without error.