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Hi HN! I started FormAPI because I've been living in Southeast Asia for the last few years, and I've had to fill in a lot of visa application and extension form

Hi HN! I started FormAPI because I've been living in Southeast Asia for the last few years, and I've had to fill in a lot of visa application and extension forms. I want to build a service where you can fill in visa forms online, so I built FormAPI as the first step towards that project. I also used to work at Gusto (a payroll company), and we had to fill out a lot of tax forms, which took a lot of work. I know this is something that many financial and legal startups have to do, so hopefully FormAPI can make this process a lot easier. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

bitL 9y ago
Very cool! I had a similar idea, taking a smartphone hovering over a form, automatically detecting form type using CNNs, performing OCR and filling in some example data showing how the form has to be correctly filled. There seems to be quite a lot of potential in business for this ;-)
Eridrus 9y ago
IMO integrating this into a system that already knows these things about a user would be super powerful. Obviously you can start with the most basic things like name, address, birthdate, etc, but to the extent that you can capture data every time a user fills out a form it becomes akin to a field linking problem that you can generalize across users. Obviously the privacy folks here will hate this idea, but a system that could fill out forms for you because it already knows most of the structured data about you would be amazing.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  That's what I would like to do for the immigration service that I'm planning to build on top of FormAPI. For example, every time you visit Vietnam, you have to fill out this visa application form: https://app.formapi.io/templates/c59fc7c0cc4df684a13cf4d04e60b729/form https://app.formapi.io/templates/c59fc7c0cc4df684a13cf4d04e6... (That's a working example.) I would love to be able to save my details and automatically fill out most of the fields in these forms.
- solatic 9y ago
  It would be useful more as a tool to help migrate away from e-paper workflows, i.e. emailing PDF scans of legacy paper forms, and towards smarter architectures. For example: suppose a customer with a workflow where the customer fills out a PDF form and emails the completed PDF to an externality (e.g. supplier, other department whose workflow they can't control, etc.). So you build a modern UX that uses the PDF API to fill out the PDF with the data from the UI, and then email the PDF to the externality, just like before, so that they're on-board with the new UX (since it doesn't affect them at all). Once you build the new UX, you can then sit with your externality and figure out what they need in order to hook into the modern system. After all, they benefit from a single queryable source of truth, just like anybody else, and the customer is generating that source of truth when they put their info into the UI which ultimately emails the PDF. Once you build the UX for the externality, there's no need to retrain your original customers - they can keep using the modern UX you built for them before. All you have to do is update internally to make sure you're updating the sources the externality's UX expects, stop using the PDF API and emailing the results, and your migration is finished in a pretty simple way that is transparent to the customer.
  - nathan_f77 9y ago
    This is what SeamlessDocs [1] are doing for government forms, and I've been thinking about doing something similar for immigration. [1] https://www.seamlessdocs.com/ https://www.seamlessdocs.com/
    - konschubert 9y ago
      I think there are much greater business opportunities beyond immigration. I mean, please do it for immigration, that's a good deed. But I think the money is in using this technology in order to build “fill-in wizards" for businesses, especially law firms and other "conservative", paper-driven industries.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    If this is done without an API, I feel like this is worse, because now everyone is locked into using a specific web app which has no real incentive to improve. At least everyone can generate PDFs.
sly010 9y ago
Very cool! Do you use the pdf standard form controls or is that too limited for this? My lawyer seem to have a really good system (probably white-labeled), but the pdf's it generates have issued with annotations. I have to print them using Acrobat otherwise checkboxes are sometimes missing and hidden annotations are visible.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I'm parsing the fields from PDF forms, but I don't use them in the generated PDFs. In the end it was just easier to output plain text, shapes, and checks, etc, instead of trying to work with AcroForms and XFA. (But if someone needs to generate a PDF that uses editable forms, then I can add support for that.) Your lawyer's system sounds interesting, and I can relate to those rendering issues. PDFs are incredibly complex - the PDF reference [1] has 1310 pages, and I've had to read a lot to understand things like fillable forms and transformation matrices. I ended up fixing a bug in a PDF library where all the PDFs from Google Chrome were flipped upside down - https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates/pull/20 https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates/pull/20 [1] http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf...
curun1r 9y ago
Back in 2000-2001, I worked up a prototype of something similar using Adobe's FDF SDK [1] for PDF. We had a PDF-centric application that would render to PDF using an HTML -> PDF library and it was hugely problematic, so the prototype definitely made things a lot easier and, had the business not run out of money at about that time, it would have been the direction we headed with the product. So, how similar is this to FDF? Does it use FDF under the hood? If not, what are the pros and cons of this over FDF? [1] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/fdftoolkit.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/fdftoolkit.html
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I decided not to use FDF or AcroForms / XFA to create the output PDFs. I just thought it would be easier to render the data as plain text, shapes, and images. However, I do parse form fields from AcroForms / XFA forms. I'm not sure about the pros and cons. If a customer needed to generate PDFs with data in the FDF format, then that's something that I would be happy to build.
jaequery 9y ago
how long did this project take to build?
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I've been working on this for about 2 months, although I feel like I should have launched an MVP much sooner. I was tempted to wait even longer and redesign everything, but I want to make sure I'm building something that people need.
  - jaequery 9y ago
    wow, that is fast, you might be one of those rare 10x developers! congrats and wish you success!
konschubert 9y ago
This is absolutely great and it will enable A LOT of very useful applications. One question though: I assume that the automatic detection of form fields does not always work. Especially if the PDF does not exist in a “fillable" format. Am I right with that interpretation?
- robbiep 9y ago
  Website seems to suggest that non fillable/scanned forms can be programmed/mapped with fields
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  Hi, at the moment we can only import fillable PDF forms (AcroForms or XFA.) In the future we might implement OCR and machine learning to automatically detect fields in scanned or photographed PDFs. I think it could also be useful to build an index of fillable PDF forms (e.g. from the IRS and UCSIS), and then use those original fillable PDFs whenever we detect a matching scanned form. We might also build a public database of fillable forms. But I don't want to build any of those features unless I have a customer who actually needs it. (Please send an email to hello@formapi.io if this is something you would use!)
justbaker 9y ago
As someone who has spent tireless hours doing the same work(gov forms PDF generation), I love seeing this tool. I’ve been stuck using wkhtmltopdf for too long. Unfortunately, I cannot use FormsAPI for my projects at work, but I will give the service a try to give my feedback!
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  Thanks for your comment! If it helps, we can offer licenses for on-premise hosting, and white-labeled solutions. (Please contact enterprise@formapi.io for more information.) I look forward to hearing your feedback!
sntran 9y ago
I read that you don't output fillable form, but you can. May I ask what you have in mind? I was working on a similar project but I could not figure out a way. Ended up making a XDP file...
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  Hi, yes we can output fillable PDF forms that include the fields you have configured. And yes, you were on the right track with XDP. We would generate an XDP form and store the XML under AcroForm > XFA. That's actually a great idea. If anyone is looking for a cheaper alternative to Adobe LiveCycle Designer, you could use FormAPI to create fillable PDF forms. Please send us an email at hello@formapi.io if that's something you would use. This feature would be available when you subscribe to our Starter plan, and you could create unlimited fillable PDFs.

bitL 9y ago

Very cool! I had a similar idea, taking a smartphone hovering over a form, automatically detecting form type using CNNs, performing OCR and filling in some example data showing how the form has to be correctly filled. There seems to be quite a lot of potential in business for this ;-)

Eridrus 9y ago

IMO integrating this into a system that already knows these things about a user would be super powerful. Obviously you can start with the most basic things like name, address, birthdate, etc, but to the extent that you can capture data every time a user fills out a form it becomes akin to a field linking problem that you can generalize across users. Obviously the privacy folks here will hate this idea, but a system that could fill out forms for you because it already knows most of the structured data about you would be amazing.

nathan_f77 9y ago
That's what I would like to do for the immigration service that I'm planning to build on top of FormAPI. For example, every time you visit Vietnam, you have to fill out this visa application form: https://app.formapi.io/templates/c59fc7c0cc4df684a13cf4d04e60b729/form https://app.formapi.io/templates/c59fc7c0cc4df684a13cf4d04e6... (That's a working example.) I would love to be able to save my details and automatically fill out most of the fields in these forms.
solatic 9y ago
It would be useful more as a tool to help migrate away from e-paper workflows, i.e. emailing PDF scans of legacy paper forms, and towards smarter architectures. For example: suppose a customer with a workflow where the customer fills out a PDF form and emails the completed PDF to an externality (e.g. supplier, other department whose workflow they can't control, etc.). So you build a modern UX that uses the PDF API to fill out the PDF with the data from the UI, and then email the PDF to the externality, just like before, so that they're on-board with the new UX (since it doesn't affect them at all). Once you build the new UX, you can then sit with your externality and figure out what they need in order to hook into the modern system. After all, they benefit from a single queryable source of truth, just like anybody else, and the customer is generating that source of truth when they put their info into the UI which ultimately emails the PDF. Once you build the UX for the externality, there's no need to retrain your original customers - they can keep using the modern UX you built for them before. All you have to do is update internally to make sure you're updating the sources the externality's UX expects, stop using the PDF API and emailing the results, and your migration is finished in a pretty simple way that is transparent to the customer.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  This is what SeamlessDocs [1] are doing for government forms, and I've been thinking about doing something similar for immigration. [1] https://www.seamlessdocs.com/ https://www.seamlessdocs.com/
  - konschubert 9y ago
    I think there are much greater business opportunities beyond immigration. I mean, please do it for immigration, that's a good deed. But I think the money is in using this technology in order to build “fill-in wizards" for businesses, especially law firms and other "conservative", paper-driven industries.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  If this is done without an API, I feel like this is worse, because now everyone is locked into using a specific web app which has no real incentive to improve. At least everyone can generate PDFs.

sly010 9y ago

Very cool! Do you use the pdf standard form controls or is that too limited for this? My lawyer seem to have a really good system (probably white-labeled), but the pdf's it generates have issued with annotations. I have to print them using Acrobat otherwise checkboxes are sometimes missing and hidden annotations are visible.

nathan_f77 9y ago
I'm parsing the fields from PDF forms, but I don't use them in the generated PDFs. In the end it was just easier to output plain text, shapes, and checks, etc, instead of trying to work with AcroForms and XFA. (But if someone needs to generate a PDF that uses editable forms, then I can add support for that.) Your lawyer's system sounds interesting, and I can relate to those rendering issues. PDFs are incredibly complex - the PDF reference [1] has 1310 pages, and I've had to read a lot to understand things like fillable forms and transformation matrices. I ended up fixing a bug in a PDF library where all the PDFs from Google Chrome were flipped upside down - https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates/pull/20 https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates/pull/20 [1] http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf...

curun1r 9y ago

Back in 2000-2001, I worked up a prototype of something similar using Adobe's FDF SDK [1] for PDF. We had a PDF-centric application that would render to PDF using an HTML -> PDF library and it was hugely problematic, so the prototype definitely made things a lot easier and, had the business not run out of money at about that time, it would have been the direction we headed with the product. So, how similar is this to FDF? Does it use FDF under the hood? If not, what are the pros and cons of this over FDF? [1] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/fdftoolkit.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/fdftoolkit.html

nathan_f77 9y ago
I decided not to use FDF or AcroForms / XFA to create the output PDFs. I just thought it would be easier to render the data as plain text, shapes, and images. However, I do parse form fields from AcroForms / XFA forms. I'm not sure about the pros and cons. If a customer needed to generate PDFs with data in the FDF format, then that's something that I would be happy to build.

jaequery 9y ago

how long did this project take to build?

nathan_f77 9y ago
I've been working on this for about 2 months, although I feel like I should have launched an MVP much sooner. I was tempted to wait even longer and redesign everything, but I want to make sure I'm building something that people need.
- jaequery 9y ago
  wow, that is fast, you might be one of those rare 10x developers! congrats and wish you success!

konschubert 9y ago

This is absolutely great and it will enable A LOT of very useful applications. One question though: I assume that the automatic detection of form fields does not always work. Especially if the PDF does not exist in a “fillable" format. Am I right with that interpretation?

robbiep 9y ago
Website seems to suggest that non fillable/scanned forms can be programmed/mapped with fields
nathan_f77 9y ago
Hi, at the moment we can only import fillable PDF forms (AcroForms or XFA.) In the future we might implement OCR and machine learning to automatically detect fields in scanned or photographed PDFs. I think it could also be useful to build an index of fillable PDF forms (e.g. from the IRS and UCSIS), and then use those original fillable PDFs whenever we detect a matching scanned form. We might also build a public database of fillable forms. But I don't want to build any of those features unless I have a customer who actually needs it. (Please send an email to hello@formapi.io if this is something you would use!)

justbaker 9y ago

As someone who has spent tireless hours doing the same work(gov forms PDF generation), I love seeing this tool. I’ve been stuck using wkhtmltopdf for too long. Unfortunately, I cannot use FormsAPI for my projects at work, but I will give the service a try to give my feedback!

nathan_f77 9y ago
Thanks for your comment! If it helps, we can offer licenses for on-premise hosting, and white-labeled solutions. (Please contact enterprise@formapi.io for more information.) I look forward to hearing your feedback!

sntran 9y ago

I read that you don't output fillable form, but you can. May I ask what you have in mind? I was working on a similar project but I could not figure out a way. Ended up making a XDP file...

nathan_f77 9y ago
Hi, yes we can output fillable PDF forms that include the fields you have configured. And yes, you were on the right track with XDP. We would generate an XDP form and store the XML under AcroForm > XFA. That's actually a great idea. If anyone is looking for a cheaper alternative to Adobe LiveCycle Designer, you could use FormAPI to create fillable PDF forms. Please send us an email at hello@formapi.io if that's something you would use. This feature would be available when you subscribe to our Starter plan, and you could create unlimited fillable PDFs.