New Adobe Document Services APIs unlock the possibilities of PDF

Remote work productivity is a priority as most companies are entering a new era of the hybrid office. From customer welcome kits to complex legal agreements, documents will continue to be at the core of that work. Only the ubiquity of PDF can unify those document experiences. Cloud-based APIs have proven to accelerate the development of solutions, bringing much needed relief to developers and IT organizations that are stretched thin to deliver on the demands of a digital business.

We’ve been putting our nearly three decades of PDF expertise and leadership to work by building and growing Adobe Document Services, our cloud-based APIs and SDKs designed for developers to seamlessly build new and innovative document solutions. Today, we’re announcing exciting new APIs — Adobe PDF Extract API and Adobe Document Generation API — to quickly unlock all the intelligence inside your PDFs and programmatically generate documents with dynamic data.

To date, we’ve seen tremendous adoption among developers with a more than 80 percent increase in developer sign ups, as well as a more than 50 percent increase in active integrations with Adobe Document Services since last quarter. Here’s a little more about the new APIs, as well as a spotlight on some of our new customer and partner momentum:

PDF Extract API — Unlock the content and data trapped in your PDFs

There have been countless PDFs created over the last several decades, with an estimated 2.5 trillion PDFs created every year. Can you imagine the amount of critical data inside of those PDFs?

Last year, we introduced Liquid Mode, which uses Adobe Sensei, our AI and machine learning platform, to understand the structure of PDF. The new Adobe PDF Extract API builds on Liquid Mode. It’s a cloud API that analyzes the structure from both scanned and native PDFs and extracts all elements of a PDF including text, table data, and images, with an understanding of relative positioning and reading order across columns and page breaks.

What sets PDF Extract API apart is that it can extract all PDF elements, unlike many other extraction technologies that are limited to one type, such as a table. Also, many providers are tied to specific platforms. Staying true to the principle of being platform-agnostic and unlike others, all of our APIs, including the PDF Extract API, offer the flexibility to use any modern programming language or platform.

Organizations can use PDF Extract API to quickly and accurately extract data for use in machine learning models, analysis, indexing or storage — to automate downstream processes using technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) — as well as republish PDF content across different media.

Cambridge Assessment, a leading, worldwide international exams group, has been using PDF Extract API to digitize more than 100 years of test material to create a content bank for fueling future classroom content and analyzing test performance. PDF Extract API has saved the team 2,000 days of labor for every 50,000 questions harvested, while maintaining a 90 percent accuracy rate in extracting PDF formatting and structure. Contract management and analysis platform Evisort enhanced its ability to read and understand contracts with PDF Extract API. Evisort’s leaders were impressed by how PDF Extract API preserves text, formatting, tables, images, and indentation in PDFs.

Document Generation API — The easiest and fastest way to programmatically generate documents with dynamic data

The paper-to-digital automation of dynamic, critical documents like sales agreements, SOWs, and legal documents is central to business relationships. Organizations often need to enter data into these documents, which usually come from a variety of databases like ERP or CRM systems. This work has historically been done manually, which is often complex, time consuming, and expensive, resulting in low-quality document experiences.

With the availability of Adobe Document Generation API, developers can quickly design custom Microsoft Word templates, as well as generate Word and PDF documents injected with dynamic data. The Document Generation API includes an out-of-the-box integration with Adobe Sign, so that documents are ready for e-signatures.

The Document Generation API is also available with the Adobe PDF Services connector in Microsoft Power Automate, enabling Power Platform users to easily automate the preparation of their documents for invoices, agreements, and more. These users can also access 15 new, ready-to-use templates for document workflows in Power Automate. We encourage you to try the Document Generation API Demo here.

Advancing new PDF experiences where developers work

Our vision for Adobe Document Services is to give developers and IT organizations a platform of choice and flexibility across a broad selection of APIs. As part of that mission, we continue to make sure that our APIs are available wherever developers find and manage cloud software and services for their businesses.

To that end, Adobe PDF Services API is now available in the AWS Marketplace, a global online marketplace for software and services, enabling a frictionless experience from evaluation to purchase. With your AWS account, you can now try our APIs and purchase our services in a pay as you go model, all in a few clicks.

Pushing the boundaries of PDF

We’re still only scratching the surface of delivering great services for developers to deliver seamless, delightful, and consistent PDF experiences across all of their web and mobile apps. Pushing the boundaries of PDF is in our DNA — after all, we created the standard all those decades ago. For example, there are even more frontiers for machine learning and artificial intelligence in PDF that Adobe Sensei will help drive. In the meantime, be sure to check out our Resources Page for blogs, tutorials, and use cases to inspire the kinds of PDF experiences that you can build with our APIs. We can’t wait to see what you build!