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How do I create a custom PDF?

Help Making Forms Custom PDFs

Custom PDFs

How do I create a custom PDF?How do I send a PDF summary to the submitter?

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.

1. Add a filename

First, add a file name for the PDF. 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 PDF was submitted.

2. Modify the PDF

Under PDF Content, there are three buttons that reset the the PDF to three different automated summaries. Feel free to test these out, or create your own from scratch.

The PDF editor works just like the form editor, simply click the page and type to enter text, highlight text to be able to format it or change it into a heading. Use the icons to the right of the selected line to insert other elements into the PDF.

Currently the PDF editor supports:

  • Images
  • Summaries (see below for more details on summaries).
  • Custom HTML (on the Agency plan)
  • Inserting answers to questions into the text of the page.

Note that you can use answer piping to insert answers anywhere in the content of the page.

Summary Types

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

Submission Results - Public

This is is the default submission summary, it doesn't include hidden questions, or the submission ID.

Submission Results - Private

This summary includes hidden questions and the submission ID.

Submission Results - Custom

This summary allows you to toggle on / off specific questions being shown in the summary. Note that you may need to go in and toggle on new questions as they're added to the form if you are still creating the form itself.

Receipt

The receipt option inserts a table summary of all payment or subscription related properties.

The three submission results can be displayed in as a list of questions/answers, or as a table. When you're happy with your content, click the "Download Sample" button to generate a PDF based off of the last submission on the form.

Note there must be at least 1 submission for this to work.

3. Theming (optional)
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 "Theme" section. If you make changes to the theme be sure to test out what it looks like in the actual PDF.