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Anvil PDF API — Twilio for PDFs: esign, fill, generate PDFs with one API
PDFs are cumbersome and challenging to manage with modern web technologies. The Anvil PDF API simplifies PDF filling, generation, and e-signing into RESTful endpoints, eliminating the pain of working with PDFs.
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Josh Breinlinger
I highly recommend anything @benogle makes.
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This is the pdf API I always wish existed. I love the documentation and GraphQL support. Amazing job, Ben and team!
A simple solution that gets the work done in an automated way. Well done!
Hi Makers! I'm Ben, co-founder and CTO at Anvil.
Today, we're announcing a complete PDF API to make it easy for developers to work with PDFs.
😩 The PDF problem
Paperwork and PDFs are the primary bottlenecks restricting faster adoption of digital tools in every industry. When we started Anvil, we set out to build software that bridges the past and all of its entrenched paper processes to the future of online first, data-centric operations.
On the surface, the solution appears simple. But in reality, paperwork processes are littered with nuances, exceptions, and business rules that add to the complexity of any product built to address these challenges.
💡 Anvil PDF API
Over the last couple years, we have developed a deep knowledge of PDFs, how to create them, manipulate them, and electronically sign them. We also have an extensive library of tools that make interacting with PDFs extremely easy.
Our PDF API includes the following endpoints:
Etch PDF e-sign - An easy, flexible, embeddable and customizable e-signature GraphQL API. You can also fill out a PDF form and/or generate a new PDF to be included in the signature packet with one API call.
PDF generation - An endpoint for creating PDFs from scratch. This endpoint supports markdown formatting and dynamic length tables.
PDF filling - A simple solution to fill in existing PDF documents. Set up a template in minutes, then make a request to the unique template URL with data.
🏃 Getting started
As developers, we want our developer experience to be an enjoyable one. To help you get started, we have
* Comprehensive guides
* A Postman collection
* A live e-sign demo
* An example e-sign repo
* A node client
* A couple of tutorials for common use cases: adding e-signatures to your app and generating an invoice.
Our pricing is also built to scale with your needs as you only pay for the API requests you make. We don't charge monthly recurring fees.
We hope you'll try the Anvil PDF API and get inspired to simplify paperwork processes in your industry. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions for us!
@benogle @sean_lynch you can! Just sign up, "you get a developer key, you get a developer key, everyone gets a developer key!"
I've been watching this team from the start and there's not enough room to say what amazing things are coming from Anvil!
@jryanwilliams Amazingly kind words. But also, we have a lot of really cool things in the pipeline :) for both developers and non-developers.
simple automation for operational teams who tend get stuck with all the back end underlying paperwork process. This is huge!
@kathy_m_osborne Thanks Kathy, our goal is definitely to eliminate the pain for those ops teams!
@benogle Wow. This is such a simple and elegant solution to such a complex and nasty problem. PDFs are always a headache. GraphQL support is so cool. Clean and beautiful design. Love the pay-as-you-go pricing model too.
Are you guys planning to focus more on paper-work & forms in general, or are you planning to go even deeper with PDF and add things like LaTeX support, resume templates etc?
@benogle @mechanical_turk we are definitely open to feature requests! We already have some great feedback and things to incorporate in the next iteration. Let us know if there is anything specific you are looking for.
@mechanical_turk Thanks! Specifically LaTeX support hasn't really been on our radar, but we generally have some things in the pipe that will make it even easier to generate totally all-in custom PDFs. Our goal with these APIs is to make interacting with all paperwork programmatically really really easy!
@ihor_onyshchenko Hey Ihor, you can see it near the bottom of the developers page: https://www.useanvil.com/develop...
Look great! Amazing job with the API! @benogle do you have a plan for partnerships?
@matias_lopez_diaz1 Thanks Matías! What kind of partnerships are you curious about?
Legit, I work in the fasion industry and so much human and engineering time is spent on process-related PDF
@thedaniel So true, once we started working on this paperwork / PDF problem, everywhere we looked there was more paperwork.
Working with and editing PDFs has been a huge hassle for me - this could definitely make things a lot easier! I'll check it out with my team.
