Turn a Table of Contents into Binder Tabs
If the document already has a table of contents, the tab set already exists — it just needs the page numbers scraped off. Paste it below; we clean it into one tab title per section, suggest the right cut, and open the whole set in the designer with live pricing. Free, no signup, and your text never leaves the browser.
Drop in the document itself — PDF or Word
We read the bookmarks, the contents page, the headings — or the exhibit stamps in a legal exhibit set — and turn them into tabs. Parsed entirely in your browser: the file is never uploaded.
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Every title lands on its own tab, ready to price live — nothing is saved or sent anywhere until you order.
Three ways to never type your tabs
This converter is one of three: paste a table of contents here, describe the binder in plain words and the AI designer builds the set, or photograph an existing divider set and we read the tabs off the photo for an exact reorder.
Numbering trial exhibits rather than converting a list? The exhibit tab label generator builds a whole range from a prefix and a start and end number \u2014 PX-1 through PX-150, continuing across volumes \u2014 without a document to read from.
Common questions
- How do I turn a table of contents into binder tabs?
- Paste the table of contents into the converter above — straight from Word, Excel, Google Docs, or copied out of a PDF. It strips page numbers, dot leaders, and chapter numbering automatically, leaving one clean tab title per section. Edit the list if you like, then open it in the designer: every title lands on its own tab with live per-set pricing.
- What formats does the converter understand?
- Anything that pastes as text: Word and Google Docs tables of contents, Excel column copies, PDF text selections, and plain typed lists. It handles dot leaders (Introduction....12), tab-separated page numbers, bullets, indented sub-sections, and Chapter/Section/Part/Appendix numbering in Arabic or Roman numerals.
- Should tabs match the table of contents exactly?
- Tab wording should usually be shorter than TOC wording — a tab reads at a glance, so "Safety Procedures" beats "Chapter 3: Safety Procedures and Emergency Protocols." The converter removes the numbering for you; trimming long titles down is worth a minute in the editable list. Keep the ORDER identical to the document so the binder and its contents page agree.
- What if my document has more sections than fit across one page?
- Extra tabs step into a second staggered bank automatically — 12 sections in a 1/5 cut is two full banks of five plus a bank of two. The tool suggests the cut with the fewest banks for your count, and the designer lays the banks out visually so you can see it before ordering.
- Can I upload the PDF instead of pasting?
- Yes — drop the PDF (or Word .docx) straight onto the page. The tool reads the PDF's own bookmarks if it has them, finds a printed contents page, or detects headings by type size; Word documents are read by their Heading styles. Everything is parsed in your browser — the file is never uploaded to a server — and the extracted titles land in an editable list before anything is priced.
- Can it read the exhibit stamps in a legal exhibit set?
- Yes. Drop in an exhibit PDF and the tool scans each page top for stamps — EXHIBIT A, Exhibit 12, Ex. 4, and party-prefixed forms like PX-4 or DX-7 — and builds the tab list in the order the exhibits appear. A stamped set of twenty exhibits becomes twenty correctly-ordered tabs without anyone retyping the exhibit list. Mentions of exhibits inside body text are ignored; only page-top stamps count.
- Why does my scanned PDF return nothing?
- A scanned PDF is a stack of photographs — there is no text layer to read. The converter deliberately doesn't guess at images. If the document exists only on paper, photograph the OLD tab set with the AI designer's photo tool instead, or paste the section list by hand.
- Is this free? Do you keep my document?
- Free, no signup, and the parsing happens entirely in your browser — the text is never uploaded or stored. Nothing leaves your machine until you choose to open the set in the designer, and even then only the tab titles carry over.