Improvement

We've made some improvements to the Preview tab for HTML templates.

We previously rendered the preview HTML/CSS directly in your browser, but there were often some differences between the browser preview and the actual PDFs that were generated. This was especially annoying for headers, footers, margins, and page breaks.

We now use the same PDF rendering engine to generate real preview PDFs with random data. These are rendered using your browser's PDF viewer:

Our HTML template previews are now 100% identical to the actual PDFs that you generate via API requests or by filling out the online form. Headers, footers, and margins can still be quite tricky to get right, but this faster feedback loop should make things much easier!

Improvement

The default value for the “Expire Submissions” template setting has been changed to “false”. In other words, the default setting is that we will now store all submission data and generated PDFs indefinitely.

When you create a new template, you must now opt-in if you want FormAPI to delete your submission data and generated PDFs after a certain period of time. You can opt-in by checking the box next to “Expire Submissions”, and then configuring the expiration interval (24 hours, 7 days, etc.) You can also expire a submission immediately by making an API request.

• View the Template Settings documentation for more information.

NOTE: This change will only affect new templates.

The current value of the “Expire Submissions” setting has been preserved for all existing templates. If you haven’t changed this setting before, then the default behavior was to delete all submission data and generated PDFs after 7 days.

If you were not previously aware of this default expiration behavior, please contact support@formapi.io. We would be happy to regenerate any of your previous PDFs at no cost.

New

You can now create folders to organize your templates.

Hover over the Actions dropdown list and click "Move" to move a template into a folder.

API Endpoints

You can create new folders and move templates programmatically via some new API endpoints.

API Documentation:

• Create Folder
• List Folders
• Move Template to Folder
• Upload Template into a Folder
• Show folder ID for a Template

API Clients

We have released new versions of our API clients to support the new folder endpoints, and the updated template endpoints.

These changes were released in the following versions:

• C#: 1.12.0
• Java: 1.8.0
• JavaScript: 2.12.0
• PHP: 1.12.0
• Python: 1.11.0
• Ruby: 1.11.0

New

We've added support for Undo/Redo with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Cmd on Mac).

New

We've added two new options for fields: Background Color and Character Spacing (kerning.)

When you set a background color for a text field, we'll fill in the whole box with that color before overlaying the text on top. Tip: Set the background color to white if you need to remove existing content from your PDF.

You can now also add some extra character spacing to your text if you want some extra space between each letter.

Improvement

We've just added copy/paste for fields with CMD + c and CMD + v (or Ctrl.)

We'll be working on more UI improvements for the PDF template editor, including:

• Undo/Redo
• Snap fields along horizontal/vertical axis
• Select multiple fields
  • Update the same attribute for multiple fields
  • Copy/paste multiple fields

Please let us know if you have any other suggestions!

New

We've added a batch API endpoint so you can generate up to 100 PDFs with a single request. Our API clients have all been updated with this new endpoint. View the documentation.

New

We're starting a public changelog so you can stay up to date with updates, improvements and fixes.