Hi, I have a form that effectively lets a user accept a quotation from me. Upon submission of the form, the form generates a PDF using the fillable pdf plugin (cosmicgiant) and attaches this pdf to both the client and the admin notification. Finally the form redirects the client to an external site where they are to complete a direct debit mandate for regular payments. It all works fine, with the problem being the time taken for the PDF to generate and then redirect the client, several clients have reported they though the site had crashed. I have disable the fillable pdf element to test and the form redirects to the external page quickly so the bottleneck is definitely the pdf part. I am just wondering if there is a way to show a message upon clicking the submit button, like a pop up with a simple message advising the client that they are being redirected. Thanks (form can be seen here - https://tinyurl.com/4kmck52f)
Can’t speak to the actual ask you’re after here, but are far as PDF generation taking a lot of time I can provide some information.
PDF generation with Fillable PDFs is going to add a bit of overhead to your submission time as the feed has to process and communicate with our API server to generate a PDF but it shouldn’t be adding more than a handful of seconds at most, less given we’ve recently moved to some improved server architecture.
The number one reason for PDF generation to take a long time during this process is generally if you’re working with a very big base PDF template. PDF templates you’re using with Fillable PDFs shouldn’t really be more than a few hundred KB at most, once you start getting up in MBs (which may not sound like a big file overall, but is huge for a PDF file) you’re going to start seeing slow generation requests when you submit your forms.
From just the Fillable PDFs end of things for the root cause, the best thing you can do to improve performance is look at the templates you’re using and making sure they’re as small as size as you can reasonably allow them to be quality wise, there are a number of PDF compressor tools available online (even ones provided by Adobe) that can help you get file sizes of templates smaller.
Outside of file size, it’s entirely up to how quickly your server is able to communicate with our server.
Hi Karl,
Thanks for the reply. I just checked the offending PDF and you are correct, it is 2mb in size. I will compress it later and try to get it as small as possible and see if it helps 
. I will let you know how I get on.
Thanks again,
Alan
Hi Karl, Just after a quick bit of advice if OK. What software would you recommend to add the editable fields to the PDF? I am using Adobe Professional (albeit an old version), but my base PDF file is 94kb, but after adding the editable fields the filesize is up over 1mb. Just trying to find a way of getting this file size down to try and improve the performance. Many thanks
Generally recommend using the most up to data version of Adobe Acrobat and their prepare form mode for adding the fields.
If the PDF is that small when it’s static but jumps in size after you open it up in a PDF editor and start adding fields, I’d guess you likely have some sort of setting active that is upping the inherent quality of the file significantly.
Could be something related to fonts you’ve chosen to use on the fields as well.
@karlpotter Thanks Karl. I found a nice tool online at smallpdf.com that allowed the file to compress, whilst retaining the editable parts, opposed to just flattening it. After this, the PDF is now around 100kb so I have updated the template and hopefully it might help speed up the PDF generation a bit. Thanks again, Alan