How to Create a Form with Printable PDF Entries in WordPress

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It’s easy to add a contact form to your WP site.

But what if you need to turn submissions into printable PDFs?

This greatly limits your options, but there are a few handy plugins that can make this possible.

We also have some more options available in our collection of contact form WordPress plugins.

Creating printable PDFs

In order to add this functionality to your site, I recommend using the awesome WPForms plugin.

WPForms

This premium contact form plugin also has a free version available.

WPForms includes a drag-and-drop editor that’s very easy to use. You can create a form with any fields you need in just a moment.

The form field editor

Once the form is saved and published on your site, you can begin accepting submissions. Any of the submissions can then be saved as PDFs.

Here’s how…

Saving form entries as PDFs

With WPForms installed, you’ll see a new menu added to your admin sidebar. The Entries sub-menu item will list all of the visitor submissions.

WPForms Entries

If you select any of the form entries, you’ll be able to view them in a page that looks just like the post editor. In the right sidebar, there’s an Actions section with a few tools including a print option.

WPForms Print Email

This will take you to a simple page including nothing more than the email and a few buttons.

WPForms Email Print View

Click the Print button at the top and you’ll see the familiar printing options screen provided by your browser. As you may already know, you can then change the printing destination from a printer to the PDF format.

Save As PDF

Saving as a PDF will automatically download the document to your computer.

Following these steps, you can easily produce a PDF from any form submission on your site.

Conclusion

While this solution isn’t completely automated, it makes for a quick and painless process. Once you know the steps, it only takes a minute to download a PDF of any email submitted to your site.

While I love the WPForms plugin and recommend it for every type of contact form, there are some great alternatives in our contact form plugins list post. You’ll find a lot more customizable form options there.

Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley
This article was written by Ben Sibley. He is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.