GC—008
Scarabaeidae
Bundle Beetle
Scarabaeus fasciculi
Somebody has to turn the heap into a bundle: convert everything, put it in an order, paginate it, index it, and hand over a document that a reader can navigate. It is a day of work and the kind of work nobody should still be doing by hand. Drop in the emails, the folders, the zips and the loose documents. It converts the lot to PDF, arranges it the way you say, numbers it continuously, and builds the cover index with dot leaders. A folder’s structure becomes the index’s structure. An email keeps its attachments, numbered beneath it.
In use
The short account
- Habitat
- Anyone who has to hand over an ordered, indexed set of documents — hearing and trial bundles, discovery, submissions, board packs, an insurance claim
- Range
- A desktop browser. Everything runs in the page
- Field marks
- Emails, folders, ZIPs and ordinary documents in · one paginated PDF out · a cover index with dot leaders · provenance stamped on every page · bookmarks and hyperlinks · four ways of delivering the result
- Where it lives
- Your browser. The documents are read from your disk and never sent anywhere
- On the name
- A dung beetle takes a scattered heap and rolls it into one neat sphere, methodically, all day. It is the only creature in the garden whose job description matched exactly
- Status
- In use — building real bundles in our own practice; not yet released
How it goes
Drop the heap in
Emails as .eml, .msg, .mbox or .mht; whole folders; ZIP files; and about forty kinds of ordinary document. A folder’s structure becomes the bundle’s structure.
Read, then decide
Everything comes up as a tick-box tree with page counts, and long items are flagged so you can see what is about to swallow forty pages. Untick what does not belong. Order it by date, by name, by hand, or as one merged chronology.
Take the bundle
One PDF, or a ZIP per item, or a ZIP of every item separately — whichever the person receiving it asked for.
Everything it does
- What it will swallow
- Emails in four formats, with their attachments pulled out and numbered beneath the message · whole folders and ZIP files, where the folder structure becomes the index structure · PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, text and images. System clutter — the invisible files an operating system leaves lying about — is dropped, and anything dropped is named in the log rather than disappearing quietly
- The index
- A cover index with dot leaders, an optional date gutter down the left, an optional "prepared for" line, and the bundle name ruled off at the right. Entries can be hyperlinked, and the PDF can carry bookmarks, so a reader can move around it
- Pagination that holds up
- Continuous numbering across the whole bundle · widow-safe page breaks, so an item never begins with one orphaned line · odd-page starts with numbered blank backs, for a bundle that will be printed double-sided · an item you leave out keeps a placeholder page and an "(omitted)" entry in the index, so the numbering and the index still agree with each other
- Provenance
- Each page carries a discreet header and footer saying where the page came from — which message, which attachment, which folder — so a page photocopied out of the bundle can still be traced back to its source
The bundle is built in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. The documents are read from your disk, converted in the page, and written back to your downloads. Where a bundle is contested, the setting that blocks images loading from the internet is on by default, so opening a message cannot tell the sender that you have read it.
Questions people actually ask
Is anything uploaded?
No. The documents are read and converted in your browser and never leave the machine.
What email formats does it read?
Standard .eml, Outlook .msg, .mbox archives and .mht files, with attachments extracted and numbered beneath each message.
Can I leave something out without breaking the numbering?
Yes. An omitted item keeps a placeholder page and an "(omitted)" line in the index, so the index and the page numbers still agree.
Will the bundle print double-sided?
Yes. Turn on odd-page starts and each item begins on a right-hand page, with the blank backs numbered.
Can I get separate files instead of one bundle?
Yes — one PDF, a ZIP per top-level item, a ZIP of every item, or a separate ZIP for each. The file names carry the bundle numbering.
Is the text in the bundle searchable?
Converted emails and Office documents are rendered as pages, so their text is not selectable. PDFs that arrive with a text layer keep it.