JotForm PDF Editor - Automate polished, designed documents

Years ago, I was waiting in line at a paddle sports shop. People were renting kayaks and canoes and getting fitted for life jackets. It was a brilliant, sunny day and the air buzzed with excitement. On the back wall, I noticed a framed print that read: “We don’t sell boats. We sell time on the water.” Clever — and true. People don’t desire products, they desire feelings that products give them. Back at the rental shop, very few people care about hull design or reinforced resin paddles. They want to soak up a summer afternoon. Spend time with people they love. Those two framed sentences stayed with me, and they reflect how I think about my company, JotForm: “We don’t provide online forms. We make organizations more productive.” It sounds easy for me to say this today. But it has been surprisingly tough to uncover our version of “time on the water”; our distinctive value. After all, who cares about forms? I started the company 12 years ago, and even I’m not passionate about forms. We operate in a crowded industry, where even Google is gunning for our market share. And our competitors are always pushing to “elevate” forms. They write edgy web copy about AI and conversations. Some even claim that forms are dead, while others try coining one fancy term after another. That’s fine. They can focus on the cool factor. But our customers just want to do business, and do it well. How do we know? Six months ago, our customers gave us a message that was hard to digest at first. In a series of interviews with our customers from California to Hong Kong, our User Experience Research (UXR) team found an unusual pattern. We used to think about forms as a way to collect responses & data, but we discovered that many customers were actually using our product to act on the data — to analyze and make sense of what it meant in their businesses. These interviews & further studies reinforced that JotForm was a productivity tool; not just a way to make sign-up forms or payment sheets. They showed us that JotForm doesn’t provide online forms; we make organizations more productive. And this wake-up call revealed a truth we’ve ignored for the last several years: we’ve been too comfortable creating online forms. We thought our job was simply to battle it out in a crowded space with dozens of online form builders. Little did we know that listening to our customers would transform the very DNA of our business and define a completely new market. Despite our 12 years in business, JotForm recently set out on this new journey that I’m happy to share with you today. The new PDF Editor that we've just launched represents the first step across that threshold. And it's a bold step forward for the whole company. It offers: - Automation: A single online form can generate thousands of custom different PDFs - a new one created every time someone responds to your form. PDFs can also be sent to the submitter with autoresponder attachment & transferred automatically to cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox. - Design: Not every submissions looks beautiful by default. PDF Editor allows you to create beautiful designs and customize them to your liking. - Communication: Thanks to customized PDFs and built-in sharing/archiving, PDF Editor enables you to report back to your internal & external stakeholders easily. - Durability: You can keep/archive your submission data in a formatted way. If you have time, check it out and please let us know what you think. We’ll be around today to hop in the comments. Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and have a great day! Aytekin & JotForm Team

Congrats guys, been a user of Jotform for a while so I'm happy you guys are launching products so quickly. I'm loving the bold colors & clean interface of this tool. It does seem like editing PDFs is a problem that has already been solved, which got me wondering - what's the main advantage of using this over all the other tools out there?

The PDF Editor is really easy to use. Everything is where it should be which makes editing the PDF a breeze. I especially like how you don't have to click save every time you make changes, they are automatically saved and can be rolled back at any time. The templates are clean and look awesome. They are also easy to edit and customize which is a bonus. I realized when using the PDF Editor that you can create one template and use it whenever submissions are made. This was really cool. It has really simplified the process of collecting data and storing it in PDF format.

This is really cool. I love tools like this that turn data into a more usable form. Props to @aytekintank & team, I'm a big fan of how they're consistently listening to their customers and questioning their base assumptions rather than standing still.

I think this produt will enable especially small and medium businesses to send beautifully designed, automated PDFs both internally and to their customers.

Pros:

Easy to set up & automate.

Cons:

None

This seems interesting, I’ve been using JotForm for a few of my side projects, will definitely check this out. Love reading blogs from @aytekintank and the team, by the way. Congrats on the launch!

As an enterprise user of the product, this will help us externally store the forms as part of some compliance requirements we have and provide more professional looking answers to customers who has queries on their requests made thru your forms. Previously, we were unable to share/store csv output but now we will be able to share/store it with our corporate design. One use case to mention is, we will possibly use pdf editor for creating quick quotes templates by providing an easy form interface for our sales agents - rather than them using excel sheets. Same capability on reporting would be a great improvement, where we can create pdf/or digital outputs of reports created not by single answers but by using combinations of answers, specific form fields and etc vs timeframes or users; a full blown drag and drop reporting with such customizable outlook. What I found interesting was the use of 12 column html as the baseline for pdfs. This is actually a great idea, kudos for the team! It is very straightforward and the user intuitively gets the idea of how to use it. A comment for the future: with some minor touches, this can easily become a website editor. Think about it 😄 You may wanna complete the e-commerce related use cases happening over your product 😃 We will be using this new tool within our workflow. Congratulations on the release.

This is a so much wanted feature by many of us who are regular Jotform users. I appreciate the effort to make it so easy and intuitive to use, that is why I say: Way to go! Just another awesome product from the Jotform gurus!

Pros:

A much expected feature!

Cons:

Nothing as of yet.

It just works exactly as you would want it to. The PDF Editor has templates that enable you get up and running quickly.

Pros:

Well laid out user interface.

Cons:

I have not encountered any yet.

The new PDF editor is awesome! The interface makes the PDF editing task so easy. Congrats guys for this great product!

I have been using @jotform for years now and this feature is another great one in their toolbox. I think the things that I really like about this feature is 1. it integrates easily into the current workflow so I feel like it's easy to use and 2. the PDF templates give me a starting point so that I can see how this works, before I start to customize it as my own. So overall this is just a great, easy feature to use.

I have never enjoyed creating and Editing PDFs, but, this tool has changed my perception. It's easier than ever to create PDFs from the submission data. Simple tool but great functionality.

Pros:

Easier to represent the data in PDF.

Cons:

None

This product is very handy and the automation significantly reduces the time spent on organizing the documents. The templates are looking very professional. No need to mention the importance of being able to design professional looking documents for 'free'. Highly recommended to the moderate size businesses.

I run a moderate size moving company and this editor significantly reduces the time to prepare your invoices (and other documents) by the customisable templates provided.

Pros:

This halves my time and my staff's time spent prepping Documents so that we can focus on the day to day integral work tasks.

Cons:

None

JotForm has really stepped up the game of automation with this new product! As a JotForm user, it will make a world of difference for me to convert my data into PDF format, which took a considerable amount of my time in the past. Besides the benefits of automation and durability of my data the design of the documents are truly something else 😊 Kudos to the entire crew, keep up this amazing pace and bring us more productivity solutions!

Pros:

Automation of pdf creation

Cons:

Nothing

Congrats on launching! :)

The PDF editor is really a cool tool, it's very easy to use, there are lots of templates, easy to design anything you need, this is obviously one of the greatest products in terms of usability and usefulness. Thanks for this :)

I wonder why this was not created 10 years ago! I will be using it frequently from now on.

Pros:

Easy to use, short setup time, free.

Cons:

None.

It seems like this is very similar to Airtable's "Page Designer". Correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't looked much into this product.

JotForm PDF editor is a great solution to generate custom PDFS from users submissions without having to copy the form responses to edit, creating ellegant documents to share and print automatically.

Pros:

Very useful and time saving.

Cons:

Not cons yet