Generate Documents from the Dashboard

You can generate documents directly from the PDFMonkey dashboard without writing any code. This is useful for one-off documents, testing a template before integrating the API, or when non-technical team members need to produce PDFs. For a detailed walkthrough, see From Zero to Your First Document.

Prerequisites

Before generating a document, you need:

• A PDFMonkey account (register here)
• A published template – if you have not created one yet, follow the getting started tutorial

Create and generate a document

1. Navigate to the Documents page.
2. Click Create my first Document (or New Document if you already have documents).
3. Select a template from the dropdown and click Create a draft. This opens the Document Editor.
4. In the Data tab, provide the JSON payload your template expects – this follows the same structure as the test data you defined in your template.
5. Optionally, switch to the Meta data tab to set a custom filename or other metadata.
6. Click Save to refresh the preview panel on the right, then click Generate.

What happens next

Once you click Generate, the document enters the document lifecycle. When its status reaches success, a temporary download URL appears on the document page. You can also find all your generated documents on the Documents page.

If something goes wrong, check the Troubleshooting section.