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I'd like to get some direction on how services like DocuSign, EchoSign, FillAnyPDF etc. are delivering the UI for creating fillable PDFs, editing them and embedding signatures (both font and gesture capture) from an online interface.

As an example, here is EchoSign's demo: https://secure.echosign.com/public/embedesignhtml?rdid=ZM5W64XRN7E&token=&hosted=false&

I can see that their interface is javascript based with the bulk of the JS being handled by: https://secure.echocdn.com/resource/148097141/bundles/esign.js

The interface is remarkably similar in functionality to DocuSign, so it seems to me that there is some generally available or at least standardized method to render a PDF in a web-page, and allow form creation/editing/filling operations.

I'd like to know if such a tool or library is available either commercially or in an open-source license.

Thanks!

SR

Shaheeb Roshan
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2 Answers2

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One way to get a rendered, fillable document into your solution is to actually get a DocuSign account. You can embed the signing experience of DocuSign through a web service call. Essentially the document(s), any form fields and signatures are going to be rendered using AJAX.

You can actually try it out immediately by going to www.docusign.com/devcenter and getting a free developer account. The web service calls you are looking for are: 1) CreateEnvelope - to specify the documents in PDF or any format, fields and recipient information. 2) RequestRecipientToken - to get a rendered view.

Alternatively you can go the Adobe way which is to put a PDF for rendering and if folks have Acrobat plugin installed it will render everything in an Acrobat window. As you might guess the Adobe plugin rules out most of the mobile devices and any browsers that don't have it installed. I, for example, use a Mac so I never actually downloaded Adobe Reader because Mac renders PDFs just fine without it.

Hope this helps!

-mb

PS: For full disclosure I work for DocuSign and drive developer adoption of DocuSign API.

mikebz
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  • Thank you Mike! My team has been evaluating DocuSign, and we've been very pleased with the results so far. API is clean and easy to integrate. The reason for the question, however, is that we are exploring the possibility of hosting the signing technology ourselves, without use of a 3rd-party service. Now, whether we *should* do this or not is a different question, but for the moment, we want to know whether we *can* and what the effort may look like. Upvote for providing a great service! – Shaheeb Roshan Feb 20 '12 at 19:02
  • Hey Shaheeb! Here is a quick overview of what happens in the background. We have some licensed and some in-house developed components that parse our PDFs, Word Docs and other types. We also have some technologies that convert those types into simple web UI - flat PNG files and form fields. There is also workflow support in document and in transaction. All those things need to work together to display consistently on various browsers on PCs, Macs and devices. – mikebz Feb 21 '12 at 20:50
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EchoSign provides a comprehensive list of Web Services APIs, to enable you to leverage the functionality of converting a PDF Form into a web-fillable experience. The Web Services API methods are available at https://secure.echosign.com/redirect/latestApiMethods.

You can embed the EchoSign form-filling and signing experience within your application, we call this the embedded widget experience. Through the API, you can call the EchoSign service to set up a widget and get a unique URL for the widget which can be embedded within your application. The service will notify you whenever someone completes one of your hosted forms and you can download a copy of the completed and signed PDF from EchoSign.

To try this out, sign up for a developer account at https://secure.echosign.com/public/upgrade?type=developer&cs=api_page.

Let me know if you have more questions.

  • Mangesh EchoSign Product Management
Mangesh Bhandarkar
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  • Thank you for the feedback Mangesh. We recently discovered EchoSign (through the Adobe acquisition pr). As I commented above, our goal is to explore the effort to deploy this functionality ourselves, without use of a 3rd party. – Shaheeb Roshan Feb 20 '12 at 19:04