Downloads

This publication is pleased to offer our readers a selection of computer-related features for promoting, in one way or another, better style.

The Legal Papers Project

The Legal Papers project is a resource of in situ legal filings designed to aid legal writing. It can be viewed at this link.

The BSB Handbook: Re-Typeset

I am pleased to have edited a new, more user-friendly edition of the BSB Handbook, which allows for a clearer and quicker determination of the rules. This version of the Handbook may be downloaded at this link, or viewed below.

The ‘Better BAILII’ Extension

This is a small piece of software for making reading BAILII nicer by reformatting the text to conform with the orthodox rules of typography and allows for the easy searching of paragraph numbers. It may be downloaded here for users of Google Chrome™ and it may be downloaded here for users of Mozilla Firefox™ . The development of the extension takes place on this Github™ page.

The ‘Better Legislation’ Extension

This extension changes the typography on the UK legislation and Gazette websites to be prettier and more correct, using the Palatine Parliamentary typeface (see infra). It may be downloaded here from the Chrome web store. The version for Firefox can be downloaded at this link.

The ‘Better AustLII’ Extension

This extension changes the typography on the AustLII website to make it more appealing. It can be downloaded here from the Chrome Webstore. The version for Firefox can be downloaded at this link.

The ‘Better CJEU’ Extension

This extension changes the typography on the CJEU websites of EU case law to make it more appealing. It can be downloaded here from the Chrome Webstore. The version for Firefox can be downloaded at this link.

The ‘Palatine Parliamentary’ typeface

This tyepeface is entirely free to download and use, and is an exact copy of the typeface used by our most glorious and sovereign Parliament. It is thus very well suited to legal drafting. It may be downloaded here.

PDF software

For users of MacOS, this publciation provides two useful pieces of software. First, pdfwordcounter is a small application which allows the counting of words in a PDF. It can be downloaded at this link. Meanwhile, the application macOCR allows for optical character recognition (OCR), meaning scanned PDFs which are not searchable (or whose text cannot be copied) can be turned into searchable and copiable documents! This application uses the Tesseract engine to efficiently turn a PDF into a fully usable and searchable PDF/A file, great for use in law. It can be downloaded at this link.

LaTeX packages

Several packages for LaTeX, including some of specifically legal interest, may be found at the editor's CTAN page at this link.