Even though PDFs are widely used by courts all over the United States, and many federal courts are now requiring the PDF/A standard for filings, there is no federal standard for transcripts to be delivered in PDF format that state courts are also mandated to follow.
Court reporters usually provide PDF versions of a transcript to their client, but their native file format is an ASCII TXT, which is the same format used by TranscriptPad and most transcript review software.
The issue with with supporting PDFs for transcripts is the many different variables, such as native PDFs versus scanned PDFs, and if scanned PDFs were OCR’d. And OCR'd PDFs are only as accurate as the OCR software that was used. What if that one key word critical to your appeal wasn't read by the OCR software (5m1th instead of Smith) and therefore didn't appear in a search result?
If you have a transcript that is only available as a PDF file we recommend importing it into DocReviewPad where you can assign Issue Codes to certain pages of the transcript, and/or add sticky notes that will refer to certain lines of a page.