How do I create a custom PDF?

Paperform Pro and Agency plans come with the ability to create your own PDFs with whatever content you would like! If you are on Essentials, you can upgrade to Pro to get access to this feature.

Custom PDFs are generated when a form is submitted. PDFs can then be downloaded manually from the submissions page, accessed via direct integrations, webhooks, or attached to emails.

Creating PDFs

To add a custom PDF to your form, simply go to After Submission → Custom PDFs, and click the "Add PDF +" button.

This will open the PDF designer.

File name

This will identify the PDF in submission results, email attachments, etc. You can optionally insert answers into the file name (e.g. if you wanted to add the submitter's name, or the date/time the form was submitted). To pipe in an answer, select the quesiton using the grey + icon to the right.

Theming

If you would like to change the fonts, font size, color, or line height of any of the text in the PDF, you can do this under the "Theming" section. If you make changes to the theme, be sure to test out what it looks like in the actual PDF using the "Download sample" button.

PDF Content

The PDF editor works just like the form editor; simply click the page and type to enter text, then highlight text to format it or change it into a heading.

When you click on a blank line, you'll see three icons to the left of the cursor (or four, for Agency users). You can use these to add answers and other content to the document.

Hover over each icon to see what it does.

• Insert Answers: Add the submitter's answers directly to paragraphs or headings, right alongside any other plain text (also known as answer piping). These can be formatted just like any other text on the page.
• Add Summary: Create a new Submission Summary (more info below).
• Add Images: Upload images from your computer or pull images from Unsplash.
• Add HTML (Agency only): Custom blocks of HTML will be applied to the page before the document is generated. This can be useful for adding elements not otherwise supported, like background images. Please note that answer piping is not supported inside of custom HTML blocks.

Using Submission Summaries

When you first create a new PDF, you'll see a Submission Summary in the document by default (the blue box). You can use this, but you're not required to—feel free to delete it and use answer piping instead if you prefer. Or, you can use multiple Summaries to split the answers up and add other content in between each block.

There are a few different types of summaries you can insert into the PDF:

• Public: Shows all of the visible questions and answers, suitable to send to customers.
• Private: Shows all questions and answers, including hidden questions, scores, and the submission ID.
• Custom: Choose which fields you would like to display. Note that after you set up the PDF, any new questions added to the form will be toggled off by default.
• Receipt: Shows an itemized summary of any payments made on this submission.

Submission Summaries also give you the option to include or omit unanswered questions, as well as the choice between List or Table format.

Sample PDFs

The "Download sample" button can be used to see how your PDF would look using data from the most recent submission of the form.

The form must have been submitted at least once already for this button to work.

If new questions have been added since the form was last submitted, or if not all questions are required, consider sending through a test submission yourself before working on the PDF. That way, you'll know exactly what answers you're expecting to see when you download the sample.

Gotchas

• Designing and saving a new custom PDF will not retroactively create PDFs for previous submissions. These are generated on submission, so the design must exist already when the form is filled out.