A form response, signed

One submission, one envelope

When a response arrives on a form carrying e-signature fields, a background job renders that response into a PDF and hands it over as an envelope. The response row then records the envelope it produced, which is what makes the whole thing safe to replay: a duplicate message finds the envelope already recorded and does nothing rather than sending a second request to the same people.

Each e-signature field is one signer

The form decides who they are. A signer's address can be fixed on the field so the same manager signs every submission, pulled from another answer so the person who typed their email in question two is the one asked, or requested at fill time. Their position in the signing order comes from the field as well, so a submitter can be asked first and an approver second.

Boxes measured on the rendered page

The renderer reports the position of each signature area on the page it produced, in browser pixels, and those are converted into PDF points by scaling against the width of an A4 page. Printed lines under the signature, labelled Name, Title, Company or Date, become fields of the matching type, with the Name line required. Anything unrecognised becomes a plain text field carrying its printed label.

The certificate follows the form's setting

Whether the certificate of completion is appended to the finished PDF is decided by the e-signature field on the form rather than in the envelope. That keeps the choice with the person who designed the form, which is the right place for it when the same form runs a hundred times and nobody wants to make the same decision a hundred times.

When the render fails

If a signature area cannot be found on the rendered page, the job stops with a permanent error and the response is marked as failed with the reason recorded against it, rather than producing an envelope with a signer who has nowhere to sign. Failures that might be temporary are retried instead. The distinction matters: a retry loop on a genuinely broken form would email your signers repeatedly.

How it works, in three steps

1. Step 1

   Add an e-signature field to the form

   One per signer, each with a source for the signer's email and a position in the order.

2. Step 2

   Somebody submits the form

   The answers are rendered into a PDF and handed over as an envelope automatically. There is no manual step.

3. Step 3

   The signers are invited in turn

   Each gets a private link. The finished PDF comes back with a certificate recording the events behind each signature.

Limits worth knowing

• Signing starts after the form is submitted, not while it is being filled in.
• Every signer on this route is invited with a link only. Access codes and emailed codes are not available here.
• One envelope per response. There is no way to batch several responses into a single document.
• If the form has no e-signature field, nothing is handed over and the submission behaves normally.

Questions people ask

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