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Version: v6

Gravity PDF 5 Minute Installation

Gravity PDF 6.x PDF Creation

Gravity PDF is a free WordPress plugin built for the popular premium form builder software, Gravity Forms. Gravity PDF allows you to generate PDF documents that contain user-data captured with Gravity Forms.

The look and feel of the PDF is controlled through templates. The software comes with four free template designs, but you can also purchase additional templates from the template shop, build your own using HTML and CSS or have our team custom-build one for you – our team can even auto-populate existing PDF documents like government forms (not available in our free edition).

If you enjoy video tutorials, you can watch a 13-minute Getting Started video for Gravity PDF where Gravity PDF's lead developer takes you through the installation and basic setup process, but also goes into more detail about the various Gravity PDF features and settings available.

Installation

Assuming you meet the software minimum requirements, the installation is a breeze. Head to Plugins -> Add New in your WordPress admin area, search Gravity PDF, click Install Now and activate. It's that simple!

Installing Gravity PDF via the WordPress admin area

View additional information about the software requirements and other installation procedures.

Core Fonts

After activating the plugin for the first time, you'll be prompted to install the core font files needed to generate your PDFs. Click the Install Core Fonts button and Gravity PDF will download and save the fonts locally. This is a one-time action and once complete you won't need to repeat this step again.

This is the Font Downloader prompt you will see upon activation

View additional information about the Core Fonts that are installed, and alternate installation methods

Global Settings

After activating, head to Form -> Settings -> PDF and check over the plugin's default settings. The software uses sane defaults, but you may want to tweak the default paper size, template and font family, size and colour. You may also want to enable on Background Processing for faster form processing.

The global Gravity PDF settings page

View more information about the general PDF settings.

Creating a PDF

Next, it's time to setup a PDF for one of your Gravity Forms. Select Forms in the main navigation and then choose one of the forms you want to integrate with. From the form editor page that loads, hover on the Settings menu in the horizontal navigation and choose PDF from the dropdown menu shown. Finally, select the Add New button to create a PDF.

The PDF Form Settings page

While there are a lot of options available to you, only the Name and Filename settings are required. Go ahead and fill those in. You can choose a Template from the dropdown or leave it set to the default option. If you want the PDF automatically attached to the email when your form is submitted select the Gravity Forms Notification you want to attach it to in the PDF Notifications setting. Finally, click Add PDF to complete the setup.

Adding a new PDF to a form

Now that you've setup the PDF you can view and download it from the Gravity Forms Entries page in your admin area (just make sure you've submitted an entry already). If you configured it, when a new entry is submitted the generated PDF will be attached to the email notification.

Download the PDFs via the Entries page

View more information about configuring PDFs.

If you would like to add a link to the PDF on your form's Confirmation page you'll need to use the [gravitypdf] shortcode. Read more about it in our shortcode documentation.

Help and Support

If you run into trouble during any of these steps head to our support page. From there you can search and review our documentation, or get in touch with our friendly support team should you still have issues.