In any modern business, PDF documents are a constant. We use them for contracts, invoices, reports, and forms. But managing these documents—filling them out, securing them, preparing them for sharing—often involves repetitive, manual tasks that consume valuable time and are prone to human error. What if you could automate that entire process?
Today, we’re excited to announce a major expansion to our API. Beyond document generation, you can now leverage a new suite of PDF Services API endpoints designed to programmatically manage and manipulate your documents. This powerful toolkit helps you eliminate manual bottlenecks, increase efficiency, and build more robust, automated document workflows.
The Core Benefits of Automating PDF Tasks
Integrating our PDF Services API into your applications isn’t just about saving a few minutes. It’s about fundamentally improving how your business operates.
- Increase Efficiency: Reclaim countless hours lost to manual data entry and file management. Automating tasks like form filling or watermarking frees your team to focus on high-value work.
- Eliminate Human Error: Manual data entry inevitably leads to mistakes. API-driven workflows ensure that your documents are populated with accurate, consistent data every single time.
- Enhance Security: Programmatically encrypt sensitive documents before they are stored or shared, ensuring you meet compliance standards and protect confidential information without relying on manual intervention.
- Scale with Confidence: Whether you need to process ten documents or ten thousand, an automated workflow handles any volume with the same speed and reliability, allowing your operations to grow seamlessly.
An Overview of the New PDF Services API
Our new endpoints provide a comprehensive toolkit for post-generation document processing. Here’s a quick look at what you can now do via API:
- Add Watermark: Programmatically apply a text or image-based watermark to any PDF, perfect for branding, marking document status (e.g., “Draft,” “Confidential”), or protecting copyright.
- Encrypt: Secure your documents with password protection. All data is handled securely over HTTPS and meets ISO 27001 standards.
- Decrypt: Programmatically unlock password-protected PDFs when you have the necessary credentials, allowing for automated processing of incoming secure files.
- Optimize: Significantly reduce the file size of your PDFs without compromising quality, making them easier to store, email, and share online.
- Extract PDF Form Fields: Send a PDF and get a structured JSON response of all fillable fields, making it easy to map your data for automated form filling.
- Fill PDF Form Fields: Automatically populate fillable PDF forms by sending your data as key-value pairs.
Real-Life Examples Using the PDF Services API
To show you the practical power of these new features, let’s explore three common business scenarios that can be completely automated.
Automated HR Onboarding with Form Filling
The Challenge: When a new employee joins, an HR administrator spends hours manually filling out a stack of documents: contracts, tax forms, NDAs, and policy acknowledgments. It’s slow, tedious, and a single typo can cause major issues.
The API Solution:
- When a candidate’s status is changed to “Hired” in your HR system, a webhook is triggered.
- Your application backend gathers the new employee’s data (name, address, start date, etc.).
- It then makes a call to our Fill Form Fields endpoint, sending the blank contract PDF and the employee’s data as a simple JSON object.
- The API instantly returns a fully populated, accurate contract. This process is repeated for all necessary onboarding forms. The completed documents can then be sent to an e-signature service.
The Benefit: The entire onboarding document workflow is reduced from hours to seconds. It ensures accuracy, provides a professional experience for the new hire, and frees up your HR team for more strategic initiatives.
Managing User Uploads with PDF Optimization
The Challenge: Your web application allows users to upload supporting documents, such as proof of identity, financial statements, or project plans. Users often upload massive, uncompressed files (e.g., a 20MB scan of a single page), which quickly inflates your cloud storage costs and makes the documents slow to load for your internal teams.
The API Solution:
- A user uploads a PDF document to your application.
- The file is received by your server and an asynchronous background job is initiated.
- This job sends the uploaded PDF to the Optimize endpoint.
- The API returns a much smaller, web-friendly version of the document.
- Your application replaces the oversized original file with the newly optimized one for long-term storage.
The Benefit: You can reduce your storage costs significantly. Your internal applications become faster and more responsive, as your team no longer has to wait for large files to load.
Get Started Today
These new PDF Services are designed to give you a complete, end-to-end solution for automated document management. Stop treating PDFs as a manual problem and start seeing them as an integrated part of your automated workflows.
Ready to build? Dive into our API Documentation to see how easy it is to get started.
