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Hello community,

I’m a coordinator for events around Cleveland, Ohio and we track food truck vendors in Airtable. Each vendor needs to submit a TFSO permit (Temporary Food Service Operation), which is a standardized PDF. Right now we export each record from Airtable and manually fill out the permit PDF, which is repetitive and slow. 

I just discovered Instafill.ai, an AI PDF form-filling service. They have a case study about automating Michigan STFU permits, which sounds like exactly what we need.

Has anyone used Airtable automations to send base data to similar services? Or used Zapier to automate filling PDF permits from Airtable records? 

Any tips or examples would be a huge help. I can share the blank permit PDF if that’s useful. Thanks!

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Hi ​@nelly91,

Your #1 best bet for that is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it will automatically generate the filled-out PDF file for you as soon as your vendors submit the form. And all of their information will go into your Airtable base as well.

In fact, I demonstrate exactly how to do this, step-by-step, on this Airtable podcast episode:

Fillout also offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, so if you wanted to, you could have your vendors update their Airtable records after their initial form was submitted.

Alternatively, here are a few popular 3rd-party apps for automatically generating PDF documents from Airtable:

  1. DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files.
  1. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files. 
  1. Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing, even something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents.

    You can also use Make with something like PDFFiller (or any other PDF app) to fill out PDF forms.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
     
  2. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable — As I mentioned above, Fillout is likely your best bet. It lets you automatically generate custom PDF files from a form submission.

Hope this helps!

If you need more help with this, or if you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hey ​@nelly91!

I have not used Instatool, however I def support Scott’s answer above. Fillout is my go-to solution for generating PDFs out of “form-submission” type workflows.

Feel free to take a look at it (no automations needed, just very easy integration and mapping of fields to PDF). If you need any help setting that up, feel free to grab a slot using this link.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hello Nelly,

You can use Typeflow.us. We have our own form that lets you generate PDFs whenever there is a new submission. 
If needed, you can also pair Typeflow.us with Fillout.com. It’s up to you. 

 

Happy to help you if needed,

  • f you’re comfortable with a little code, Airtable’s Scripting extension or Automations can generate a filled PDF using libraries like pdf-lib or APIs like PDF.co directly.

  • This gives you more control, but is a bit more technical.

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