exhibiter 0.10.1

a tool to organize evidence for litigation

This is a tool to help organize evidence for litigation. If you keep your evidence as named pdf, jpg, and png files in numbered exhibit folders, the program can automatically generate an exhibit list (.docx) and a PDF of all evidence (with exhibit dividers), suitable for jury documents and discovery responses.

I made this tool in the hopes that it would make eviction defense a little easier. Plaintiffs may use it as well, but eviction plaintiffs and their representatives may not.

Copyright (c) 2020 Simon Raindrum Sherred.

Installation

Exhibiter requires Python 3.8 or higher to run. Here is the link to install it, if needed. If you use Windows, make sure to choose the installer options to add Python to your PATH, and to disable Windows' 260-character path limit.

Once you have Python, you can install the program from a command prompt. On Windows, that's the cmd application; on MacOS it's Terminal. Run the following command:

pip3 install exhibiter

When you first run the program after installing it, it will ask to install Pandoc, a free and open-source document converter. If the automatic install fails, you'll need to install Pandoc yourself.

Usage

1. Organize your Files First

To run this program, you must provide it with a folder full of organized evidence (the "input folder"). The input folder should contain one or more subfolders representing exhibits ("exhibit folders"). Exhibit folders, in turn, must contain one or more documents.

Put Exhibits in the Input Folder

Exhibits are folders whose names follow the patterns INDEX or INDEX (TITLE), where INDEX is a number, or a capital letter. An example exhibit would be 101 (Rental Agreement).

Exhibits (and individual documents) will be omitted if their folder names contain (UNUSED) or (EXCLUDE) except if the program is run in Discovery Mode (-d).

Consider the following examples:

Example Folder Name	Result
101	included as Exhibit 101
102 (Proof of Rent Payments)	included, and its entry in the Exhibit List (though not the PDF) will be preceded by a title
103 (UNUSED)	excluded, except in Discovery Mode
104 (Photographs of the Interior) (UNUSED)	same as above, but with title
Notes	excluded because it doesn't follow the NUMBER (TITLE) format
105.pdf	excluded because it is not a folder

You probably shouldn't provide titles for Exhibits that contain only one Document, because in that case the Document name would make the title redundant.

Put Documents in each Exhibit Folder

Each exhibit folder must contain one or more documents, which will be arranged alphabetically based on their filenames.

A document can be one of three things:

1. a PDF,
2. an image (specifically .png, .jpg, or .jpeg), or
3. a folder of images. The images will be arranged alphabetically by filename, but only the folder's name will be used as the name of the document.

Anything else in an Exhibit folder will be ignored, except evidentiary disputes.txt. If this file is present, its contents will be written into the Evidentiary Disputes column of the Exhibit List.

Rules for Document Names

Within each exhibit, the program always arranges documents alphabetically based on their filenames.

• To arrange documents chronologically, their names must start with a date in YYYY-MM-DD format followed by space (no other separators). For example, 2020-01-02 Welcome Note.pdf will be detected and displayed in the Exhibit List as "Welcome Note 1/2/20."

• Documents with dates will normally appear before those without, because numbers precede letters.

• To arrange documents manually, precede each filename with a series of digits, followed by a period and a space. For example, 01. Welcome Note.jpg will be displayed in the Exhibit List as "Welcome Note." Leading numbers in this format will be hidden in the List unless the program is run with the -k or --keep-digits option.

• Documents whose names contain the (UNUSED) or (EXCLUDE) tag will be omitted from the output unless the program is run in Discovery Mode (-d). In Discovery Mode, the tag will be ignored and the Document will be included, with the tag stripped from its name.

Example Folder Structure


This example folder demonstrates most of the ways evidence can be arranged:

• Exhibits 102 through 104 have titles because their filenames contain a section in parentheses. Exhibit 101 is given no title because it would be redundant when it contains only one document.
• The contents of Exhibits 102 and 103 are arranged chronologically because their filenames start with a date in YYYY-MM-DD format. They will appear in the exhibit list in chronological order, and the dates will be processed so that they show in the exhibit list as, e.g., "Rent Receipt 1/1/20."
• The exact date for the security deposit in Exhibit 102 isn't known, but it can be manually arranged by giving it a number lower than the dates (here, 1). Because the number is followed by a period and a space, the program knows to exclude it from the document's name in the exhibit list; it will appear only as "Security Deposit."
• One of the rent receipts in Exhibit 102, and the entirety of Exhibit 103, are marked "(UNUSED)." Therefore, they will be omitted unless the program is run in discovery mode.
• Most files in the above example are treated as individual documents, whose filenames will appear in the exhibit list. The three images in the "Ceiling Photos" folder in Exhibit 104 are an exception; because they are inside a subfolder, they are treated as a single three-page document named "Ceiling Photos."

2. Run the Program

Exhibiter is primarily a command-line tool, though it also has a basic GUI option.

First, open a command line. On Windows, this is the program called cmd. On MacOS, it's Terminal.

If you don't like command lines, use the exhibiter -g command. In this mode, pop-ups will prompt you to select the input folder and name the output list and PDF.

If you don't use the -g option, you will need to specify an input folder from the command line by running exhibiter INPUTFOLDER. In this mode, the program will output to Defense Exhibits.pdf and Defense Exhibit List.docx in the current directory, unless you override those defaults with the -o and -l options respectively.

To see more options you can specify when running the program, run exhibiter -h.