Generating your first Document with Zapier

Ready to generate your first document with Zapier and PDFmonkey? Learn to create your first document effortlessly with PDFMonkey's step-by-step guide.

Create an account on PDFMonkey

To create an account, go to the Register page and fill in you email and password.

We do not ask for a password confirmation but you can toggle password hiding by clicking on Show my password.

Once you’ve filled in your credentials, we will send you an activation email. Click the link in the email to activate your account. You will not be able to sign in until your account is confirmed.

Sign in

Once your account confirmed, fill in your credentials in the Sign in page to get access to your dashboard.

Create your first Template

To create a template, head to the Templates page and click on Create my first Template.

Give a name to your template, select the Code edition mode and select the Base Template named Blank.

It will open the Template Editor, where PDFMonkey’s magic happens.

A name is just a name

You can change the name of your Template as often as you want, it will have no impact on your client applications.

Writing your first Template

In the HTML tab, insert the following code:

HTML

<p class="greeting">Hello {{name}}!</p>
<p>Your favorite number is {{favoriteNumber}}.</p>

In the CSS tab, insert the following code:

.greeting {
  color: #6D28D9;
  font-size: 24px;
}

And finally in the Test data tab, insert this:

{
  "name": "Peter Parker",
  "favoriteNumber": 8
}

You can now click on the Save button, and you should see the preview panel on the right update to reflect your changes.

Real PDF preview

The PDF preview you see is actually a 100% accurate version of what the final result will be as it is a real PDF, generated using the same process we use to generate your Documents.

The last step is to make your Template available for generation. To do so, click on the Publish button.

Always publish your template!

Forgetting to publish your template is a frequent mistake, especially when switching back and forth between Zapier and PDFMonkey. If the documents you generate don't match your template, always check you published it.

Authoring TemplatesWhat are the Template test data?

Generating your first Document

Now that your Template is complete, let’s head to Zapier.

For this guide we will define a Zap triggered by a form submission on Tally, generate a PDF in PDFMonkey and then send the PDF by email.

The Tally form

We will use the following Tally form as our source of information in our Zap:

Setting up your Zap

Start by creating a new Zap. As trigger we will use Tally’s New Response event:

We then proceed to fill out our form and check it’s correctly connected in Zapier:

Calling PDFMonkey

Now that we have some data to work with, we will configure our PDFMonkey action.

Select the PDFMonkey app and choose the Generate Document action.

You can then map the data from the form to variables for your Document. Make sure to use the same names as the ones used when writing the Template.

Naming variables

If you’re wondering how to write proper names so it works in PDFMonkey, we provide a list of correct/incorrect variable name formats.

We’re now ready to test the Document generation.

Sending the PDF by email

Now that our PDF is generated, let’s send it by email.

Add a new action and select the Email by Zapier app, then choose the Send Outbound Email action.

We can now use our Document’s Download URL as attachment for the email. Zapier will automatically download the PDF and attach it.

You can now test this last action and you should receive an email with the PDF attached.

Congrats! You generated your very first PDFMonkey Document using Zapier! 🎉

Want to know more?

To learn more about the different options you can use when using PDFMonkey with Zapier, head to our more thorough documentation on the integration.

We talk about using custom JSON or how to setup line items for your invoices.

Document generation options in Zapier

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