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.