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Anvil Engineering
Anvil Engineering

Posted on • Originally published at useanvil.com

New features: Text tags and word doc support

We're excited to announce two new features today that go hand-in-hand:

  1. Word document (docx) support
  2. Text tags

Word documents are often used as the source of truth for agreements, disclosures, contracts, and more. MS Word is seen as more accessible than PDFs for a large number of people across industries. And it's easy to see why; updating a Word doc is much easier than updating a PDF.

At Anvil we're committed to making paperwork automation accessible, which is why we're excited to announce the inclusion of Word document support and text tags. With the combination of Word doc support and text tags, you can now directly upload your Word documents to Anvil and we will automatically find fields that need to be filled.

docx to PDF

MS Word support

Word document support is simple: anywhere Anvil supports uploading a PDF, you can now also upload a Word document. You can upload Word documents to your template library, to a workflow, to signature packets, and via the API.

Behind the scenes, Anvil will convert your Word document into a PDF so it can be filled, signed, and used just like your uploaded PDFs.

Text tags

Text tags are pieces of text you can include in your document to indicate where someone should sign, initial, where their name should be filled, and more. Anvil will look for text tags in your document and convert them into fillable fields. Fields created from text tags can be attached to signers, or filled, just like fields you'd draw in Anvil.

For example if your document contained:

This agreement between {{signerName}} and AcmeCo. .....
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Anvil would recognize the text between {{ and }} as a text tag. When uploaded, Anvil would create a field from {{signerName}} that could be assigned to a signer.

Text tags work in both PDFs and Word documents uploaded to Anvil. See the text tags documentation for more information on how to use text tags, formatting, and their capabilities.

Text tags also work with the API, notably with Etch e-sign API, where you can automatically assign fields to signers through text tags. See the e-sign API docs for usage information.

Resources

Go forth and upload your text-tag laden Word docs! These resources should help you get up and running:

If you have questions, let us know at support@useanvil.com. We'd love to hear from you!

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