Our current documents/contract are elegant looking and I like to maintain that. WORD.
Looking at the api docs for e-sign api services they seem to accept either html or they let you mark up your own document with silly layover elements.
Not elegant.
My goal is to get the party data (people who are party to the contracts) input it once. And do a document build that is sent to an e-sign api like docusign that doesn't look like a kid made it.
My concern is I have spent hours before lost in a simple pdf render that never seems to look the way I designed it.
Not exactly what you are thinking perhaps, but this is how I did something similar.
A supervisor sets up a document for signing using a simple form (we just have templates that are filled in)
This is sent over to the employee, who can see the whole document, with a signaturepad at the bottom (signaturepad.js). This is just rendered as in a blade template. Signature is stored as a png to disk temporarily
The same document is now sent back to the supervisor who gets the same blade view, but with a signaturepad for their signature.
I render a final version with both signatures using a blade view and browsershot (found that the easiest to get it to look exactly as the original). This is saved as a pdf to disk.
I am not sure the legal implications here (in the US) but they sure market the idea of custodian, third-party as a feature... plus the ux for the signer is pretty good. I may tackle it later.
Ultimately, I stopped being a little b and wrote the damn code 🍕
we fill in the details once (now we are ready to push button send the whole transaction),
a document(s) is made via browsershot in base64pdf and sent directly to docusign, who in turn sends it to the signer. I used a tag anchor and a blade style component to correctly position the signatures for docusign
we can send the next batch of documents at the correct stage.
to be continued... implement webhooks to update our system and upload completed documents to our drive.
This saves so much time already. I suspect we will save at minimum a 24-48 hour volley with the signer. Plus all the stupid document making, pdf making, email authoring, draft management, blah blah.
@webrobert yeah we only use it for simple stuff like signing a document for bringing home computers when working from home. If you need some sort of digital signature login, docusign might be needed :)