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?

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

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 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!

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.

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