Legal Prospectus

What this template is

legal-prospectus describes the layout of a Canadian preliminary prospectus filed under National Instrument 41-101, General Prospectus Requirements. A preliminary prospectus is the unpriced, pre-final document a securities regulator reviews before a distribution is qualified; its cover carries the statutory red-herring notice from which the document takes its informal name. This page documents how the design system renders that document — page geometry, the rule-weight ladder, and per-section typography — drawn from a real delivered filing and iterated across twelve operator-reviewed render passes.

It is a member of the Paper print-token pillar. Where a UI component documents when to click a control, a Paper template documents how a page is set: margins, rule weights, type sizes, and the order of sections down the page. There are no interaction states — the template renders to a fixed PDF through WeasyPrint.

It shares the Paper pillar with five sibling document families, each documented separately: legal-subscription-agreement, legal-agency-suite, financial-report-layout, financial-statement-yearend, and interactive-pdf-binder. The prospectus is a distinct register from the subscription-agreement family it sits closest to: it adds a running header and the red-herring notice, and it links its CSS externally rather than inline.

When to use

Use this template when the deliverable is a preliminary prospectus or a document of the same regulatory register — a long-form, statutorily-structured filing that opens with a cover and red-herring notice, carries a table of contents and a summary, and closes with financial tables and a defined-terms glossary. The seven variants below are the canonical page types; a filing is assembled by selecting the variant appropriate to each section.

Do not reach for this template for a subscription agreement or an agency (underwriting) agreement — those are the legal-subscription-agreement and legal-agency-suite families, which have no running header and a different type scale. Do not use it for financial statements presented on their own; those are the two financial-* families.

Variants

The template ships seven page variants. Each is one section of the filing, set to its own local conventions but sharing the family's geometry, rule ladder, and serif reading face.

Variant	Section	Layout notes
cover-page	Cover	Red-herring notice; cover-title hierarchy (issuer = offering 14pt > doc-type 12pt > 10pt); 15pt price headline; offering table; price-to-public data table.
toc	Table of contents	All-caps entries, spaced dot-leader (CSS leader('. ')), right-aligned folio.
prospectus-summary	Summary	28/72 two-column summary table; rule.emphasis page border; dilution-sensitivity (DHS) sub-tables.
section1-preamble	Front matter	Header-free front matter — Eligibility for Investment, Forward-Looking Information, Non-IFRS Measures.
body-section	Body	"PRELIMINARY PROSPECTUS" running header (GCPM running()/element()) + folio, hairline border beneath.
financials	Financial tables	Data table with subtotal (hairline) / total (accounting-total double rule) distinction, footnotes, sup/sub numerals.
glossary	Defined terms	Definition-list glossary (dl/dt/dd).

Page geometry

Geometry resolves to the Paper pillar's primitive page dimensions. All three values are real production settings, not defaults:

Token	Resolves to	Applies to
paper.semantic.prospectus.page-margin-top	0.75in (page.margin-standard)	Top and bottom margins, body pages
paper.semantic.prospectus.page-margin-inline	0.625in (page.margin-narrow)	Left and right margins
paper.semantic.prospectus.cover-margin-top	0.375in (page.margin-cover-top)	Cover page top margin only

This matches the Prospectus row of the Paper pillar's document-families table: 0.75in standard, 0.625in inline, on letter-size stock.

Rule-weight ladder

The prospectus draws on the Paper pillar's four-step rule-weight ladder — hairline 0.5pt, light 0.75pt, standard 1pt, emphasis 1.5pt — and extends it by one rung for one specific job. Three semantic tokens pin the family's rule usage:

Token	Rung	Weight	Job
paper.semantic.prospectus.running-header-border	hairline	0.5pt	Rule beneath the running header on body pages
paper.semantic.prospectus.summary-page-border	emphasis	1.5pt	Full page border on the summary variant
paper.semantic.prospectus.total-row-rule	accounting-total	2pt	Double rule beneath a financial-table total row

The 2pt accounting-total is the family's one extension beyond the base ladder — the same double-rule convention the Paper pillar notes for a prospectus data-table total row. Within the financials variant this rule carries meaning: a subtotal is set with the hairline, a total with the accounting-total double rule, so the two are distinguishable without a label.

Typography

Two tiers, both set in the family's serif reading face — serif-legal (Times New Roman, Liberation Serif, Times, serif). The prospectus uses no separate form-fill sans face; unlike the subscription-agreement family, it has no fill-in fields.

Token	Size / weight	Detail
paper.semantic.prospectus.body-type	10pt / 400	Line-height 1.35. Reading text.
paper.semantic.prospectus.heading-type	12pt / 700	Line-height 1.2. Section headings.
paper.semantic.prospectus.running-header-type	8.5pt / 400	Letter-spacing 0.5pt. "PRELIMINARY PROSPECTUS" running header.

The cover-page variant sets its own local hierarchy above the body scale — issuer name at the offering size of 14pt, document type at 12pt, a supporting line at 10pt, and a 15pt price headline. That cover hierarchy is specific to the cover; body pages return to the 10pt / 12pt pairing above.

The 10pt body and the austere heading treatment are a deliberate Bay-Street filing register choice — not a regulatory requirement. NI 41-101 prescribes no type sizes; the register is a house decision and should be described as such, never attributed to the regulation.

The running header

The "PRELIMINARY PROSPECTUS" running header is unique to this family among the three legal-document families — subscription-agreement and agency-suite have none. It is set through Generated Content for Paged Media (running() / element()), paired with the page folio, and underlined by the hairline running-header-border. Front matter is deliberately header-free: the section1-preamble variant carries no running header, matching the filing convention that the eligibility and forward-looking front matter runs clean before the numbered body begins.

The red-herring notice

The cover carries the statutory red-herring notice set in paper.semantic.prospectus.red-herring-ink, which resolves to paper.primitive.color.regulatory-red-herring — #c00000. This is a genuine BCSC/OSC filing convention (the “red herring” designation for a preliminary, unpriced prospectus), not a brand color. It is modeled deliberately outside every brand-color group so that other design-system tenants do not inherit a securities-filing color as if it were a brand choice. Do not fold this token into a brand palette in any future review.

Accessibility

This is a print document rendered to PDF, so the interaction concerns of a UI control — keyboard focus, activation, disabled states — do not apply. Print-accessibility for the generated PDF rests on document structure:

• TOC entries are real anchor links with descriptive text, never “click here.” The dot-leader is CSS-generated and decorative; the accessible name is the section title.
• Financial tables use <table><caption> plus <th scope> so that a total or a price-to-public figure is announced with its row and column headers rather than read as a loose number.
• The red-herring notice stays in the accessibility tree. It is required statutory disclosure, not decoration, and must remain reachable — it is never rendered as a background image or presentational-only element.

The recipe declares a WCAG 2.2 AA target for the generated document. The recipe does not specify PDF/UA tagging beyond the structural requirements above; that is not claimed here.

Rendering

Print-first and static. The template renders to PDF through WeasyPrint and has no interaction states, hover, focus, or motion. Page furniture — running header, folio, page borders — is produced through paged-media CSS (@page, running()/element(), leader(), counter(page)), not through client-side script.

Open questions

Carried from the recipe, unresolved here:

• Red-herring token scope. #c00000 is a confirmed brand-neutral, standalone regulatory token (BCSC/OSC convention). It must not be folded into any brand palette during future review.
• Distribution shape. This family links its CSS externally, differing from the subscription-agreement family's inline-CSS convention. This is a cross-cutting Paper-pillar question, not resolved at the component level.
• Type-scale attribution. NI 41-101 prescribes no type sizes. The 10pt / austere-heading register is a deliberate Bay-Street filing-register choice; do not cite the regulation as the reason for the type scale in any exemplar copy.