Adding DocuSign placeholders to PDFs with Adobe or NitroPDF

Overview

For Word, Excel, and other MS Office document, placeholders are inserted into the document before it is turned into a PDF and sent through DocuSign. If you have documents that are already PDFs that you want to insert placeholders into and send through DocuSign for signing, the below solution should accomplish this.
 

Solution

If you are using Adobe, the below solution should work for any version including Reader, DC, etc.

1. Open up the PDF with Adobe
2. On the right-hand side click the "Fill & Sign"

3. Click the "Fill and sign" button

4. Click on the document where you want the signature to appear and put in your place holder according to the DocuSign documentation. In this case, we are just using an incremental placeholder. Add any other placeholders your configuration requires and then click the Close button in the top right.
   
   
5. Save the document over the top of the exiting document in M-Files or save the document locally to your computer and then drag/drop on top of the existing PDF inside of M-Files.

After you have done this, run the PDF through the DocuSign workflow and the signature should now appear in the placeholders.

If you are using NitroPDF, the solution is very similar. The only difference is as follows

1. Click the Type Text in the top left of the program
2. While holding Ctrl, click in the document where you want the placeholder to be. The text box should appear as a red box to let you know you are on the content layer. (See NitroPDF documentation link below for more information.)
3. Insert the placeholders according to your DocuSign configuration.
4. Save the document over the top of the existing PDF in M-Files or save the PDF locally and then drag/drop on top of the existing document in M-Files
5. Run the PDF through the DocuSign workflow configuration and the signatures should now appear in the placeholders.

https://www.gonitro.com/user-guide/pro/article/add-or-edit-text-in-a-pdf

Foxit

If you are using Foxit PDF tools, make sure that you use the Edit Text option. If you use the Typewriter option, it will put the text onto an annotation layer that the DocuSign integration cannot read and will ignore the placeholders. Then follow the same general procedure as above for NitroPDF.