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News 01

Typeform to PDF: Auto generate documents from Typeform using Docdown and Zapier

  • Docdown Tutorial
  • eSignature
  • Zapier
  • 12 min read
Author 04
By Pukar · July 2021

With Docdown, you can auto-generate and electronically sign your business documents, making it ideal for workflows that involve a lot of paperwork. By automating your repetitive PDF tasks using Docdown, you can save hundreds of hours of tedious work every month.

In this guide, we’re going to automate the generation of an event proposal from Typeform with Docdown. We will be using Zapier to connect these two applications.

This is a one-time setup that has three distinct steps:

  1. Creating a Typeform to gather data
  2. Setting up the document on Docdown
  3. Automating PDF generation from Typeform entry using Zapier

Creating a form using Typeform

Typeform is a web app that lets you create interactive forms. It also comes with pre-built templates for convenience. We’ll be creating a short questionnaire to gather information for our document.

Step 1: Create a new form in Typeform. Every form comes with a multitude of response options including date, short texts, paragraphs, multiple-choice options, and even a file upload system!

Typeform fields
Typeform helps make attractive survey forms. You can set different data types as seen on the right pane. On the left pane are the questions asked in the survey.

Step 2: Create and customize response fields to your liking. To collect images for use as signatures, check out the end of this section.

Step 3: Publish your form.

This part of the process is done purely to collect information. Once the automation part is complete, users can open the form and type in the details. All responses will be automatically sent to Zapier, which will then communicate it to Docdown.

Collecting images for displaying the signature

For this guide, we’ll be collecting the image URL of the signature of the user.  The image will be used to represent the electronic signatures in the document.

  • In the form, create a question asking for a client’s signature. Specify that the user should provide a URL for the signature image. The image should be publicly accessible (i.e not stored in Google Drive etc.) and be of either JPG or PNG format.
add signatures typeform
Since we will be adding signature images, simply specify that users must input image URL’s in the text field.

Setting up the document on Docdown

Docdown can edit and add on PDF documents with ease. As mentioned above, we will upload and customize one of our legal contracts for this demonstration.

Step 1: From the Document page, click on New Document and upload your PDF.

how to add document
Add a new document to Docdown

Step 2: Click on the uploaded doc to open the document editor. In the top-left pane, you will find various data types you might need in your document.

Step 3: Add the different fields in your document that needs to be dynamically filled out.

shows datafields
Customize the data fields and types to your liking

Step 4: To add the signature of your compnay, double click your signature field, find the Data Source option and select Predefined.

set predefined messages
Select your signature field and select the Data Source to be ‘Predefined’.

Scroll down the settings and click on the “Add Signature” button. In the popup modal, you can either sign on the canvas, type your name or upload an image of your signature. Now, this signature will be added automatically each time the document is generated.

predfined signature image
The predefined signature will always be generated in the document

Step 5: Now, navigate to the Workflow page and click on the New Workflow button. For the trigger, you can select either. of the “Incoming Webhook” or “Online Form” steps. We will be using the incoming webhook step as it requires no configuration for setting up any forms.

setup workflow
Set up a new workflow from the workflow page.

Step 6: In the ‘Document’ dropdown, select the document that was configured in the previous steps. To set the file name of the generated documents, you can add it into the “File Name” field. To use dynamic data from the form in the filename, click the plus sign on the right and select a field you want to use in the file name.

how to customize workflow
Specify the document in the Workflow. Make sure to add the file name to each document using the File Name dropdown.

Optional: Set up email notifications

Step 1: Click on the ‘+’ button on the workflow editor. Then, select Email action to add it to your workflow’s sequence.

add email to workflow
Add email integration to workflow

Step 2: Select an email address in the dropdown of the “From Email” section.

Step 3: Fill in the destination email address and other relevant fields. To ensure the generated document is added as an attachment, click on the “+” button in the right of the Attachment field and select {{1.generatedDocument}}.

add email details
Fill out email details and activate workflow from the top right toggle.

Step 4: Save and activate the workflow with the toggle button at the top right of the window.

Connecting Typeform and your document with Zapier

Each Zap in Zapier has a trigger and an action. The trigger is the event that kicks off the Zap. The actions are the events defined by web applications to which Zap can deliver the data from the trigger event.

In this process, we will create a Zap that fetches all information each time a response is made in Typeform. The Zap will then specify where each data will be sent in Docdown. Docdown will finish the process by generating a unique document for every new response.

Step 1: Create a new zap and search for Typeform in the Trigger section. You will be asked to choose your Typeform account and the name of your Typeform.

setting up zap trigger
For the trigger, search and select Typeform. The trigger event is set to New Entry

Step 2: Next, Zapier will perform a test run to make sure everything is in order. Once this is done, proceed to the Action phase.

Step 3: Search and select Docdown as the Action. For Action Event, choose Execute Workflow.

select docdown as action
Search for and select Docdown as the action

Step 4: Log into your Docdown account next. For first-time users, you might be asked to enter your Docdown API key. You will find this in your Docdown account under Settings > Account.

api key image
First-time users might be asked for an API key, you can find it in your Docdown account

Step 5: Next is the ‘Set up’ action step. Select your Workflow from Workflow Name. Here, we specify where each response data goes in the document. For example, in the Company-name field, we set ‘What is the company’s name?’ as the response from the Typeform.

setup zap
Once you’ve selected the Workflow name, specify where each response goes to in the documents

Step 6: To fill out the signature field, we need to map three fields of information:

  • Signer Name – Text of the client’s full legal name.
  • Signer Email – Text of the client’s valid email address.
  • Signature – The URL of the image to be used as a signature.
sign fields zap
Every Signature field requires three sub-fields of data as seen here.

Step 7: After all data fields have been mapped to the responses, click on the continue button. Zapier will perform a test run to make sure the Zap completes successfully.

You can now turn on the Zap. The zap will run automatically to ensure new data is always communicated from Typeform to Docdown.

Testing out Typeform Docdown integration via Zapier

Now that the process is all set up, let’s test it out. Our document has 8 fillable fields and here is the input data we will send via Typeform:

  1. Date: 15/07/2021
  2. Company name: ABC enterprises
  3. Company address: Tokyo
  4. Client name: John Doe
  5. Client address: Budapest
  6. Payment sum: 40000
  7. Company Signature: (Predefined in the document)
  8. Client Signature: (Sent as an image URL)

Below, you can see the generated document in Docdown. Now, every time a new response is recorded, the process runs automatically and the generated document can be found in Docdown.

pdf is ready
Our form data is now automatically generated by Docdown
signs in document
On the left, our predefined signature is generated for each document. In the right, every image URL will be tracked and added
generated docs
You can always find all the generated documents in Docdown for future reference and record!

Conclusion

By combining Typeform and Docdown, you can easily automate all forms of paperwork with a one-time setup. Down the line, it could save you and your business hundreds of hours of paperwork. Another popular alternative to Typeform is Google Forms. Google Form is free and comes with every Gmail account. If you use Google Forms instead of Typeform, we already have a guide on setting up automatic paperwork with Google Forms. For more on business automation, check out our blog!


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