What are the Acrobat Services APIs?

Adobe’s Acrobat Services APIs are your toolkit to create document experiences unique to your organization. The APIs enable the creation of custom document solutions tailored directly to your processes. Whether you’re looking to generate documents, ensure their accessibility, guarantee their authenticity, or unlock and extract data within them, Adobe Acrobat Services has an answer.

Solution Assessment

AFTIA’s experienced Document Cloud and Sign API Solution Consultants can define the scope and deliverables for your next Document Solution using Adobe's Acrobat Services API and Acrobat Sign API.

Adobe’s API Library

With 15 APIs currently available, there’s plenty of document challenges that can be overcome with one or more of the APIs at your disposal. Next, will breakdown each API and identify potential use cases. 

Adobe PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API

Powered by Adobe Sensei, the Accessibility Auto-Tag API enables organizations to ensure documents are easily navigable and comply with accessibility standards. Manual tagging of documents is tedious work that can often be error prone, Auto-Tag  helps to scale tagging efforts and can be paired with automated workflows to ensure documents are accessible as they are created. 

The Accessibility Auto-Tag API applies to a broad range of industries and can help organizations achieve regulatory compliance. 

Our Accessbility solutions include:

• Accessible Financial Documents
• Accessible Documents for all Citizens
• Accessible Documents for Students
• Accessibility Compliance

Adobe PDF Extract API

PDF’s are full of rich data that can bring new insights or provide data for your backend systems. Whether it’s text, tables or even images, the Extract API can create JSON files to move your data downstream.  Like the Accessibility API, Extract leverages Adobe Sensei technology for increased accuracy. 

AFTIA has created a number of different document intelligence solutions that leverage the extract api, see them here:

• Agreement Analysis
• Searchable Scanned Documents
• Content Comparison & Reuse
• Content Republishing

Adobe Document Generation

Adobe Document Generation allows for the rapid creation of PDFs by injecting data from backend systems into your existing templates. Create personalized documents in seconds and avoid the hassles of manually customizing documents for each recipient. 

Use Microsoft Word to author your document templates and leverage Adobe’s Document Generation Tagger add-in to insert text tags more efficiently. These text tags will later be replaced with data injected from backend systems. 

Acrobat Sign can also be integrated into the document generation process to add legally-binding electronic signatures to your newly generated agreements. 

This powerful API can be leveraged for uses cases such as:

• Sales Compensation Agreements
• Venue Licensing
• Change Order and Subcontract Processes
• Employee Onboarding

Electronic Seal API

Ensure critical business documents are tamper-free with the electronic seal api.  After a seal is applied to a document any modifications will be detected and will invalidate the digital seal. 

Adobe’s electronic seal api also complies with eIDAS which is essential for any organization conducting business in the EU. Learn more about eIDAS compliance here.

The electronic seal API can be used to ensure the authenticity of a wide variety of documents. Take a look at some examples here:

• Quote and Invoice Authentication
• Secure Transcripts
• Government Publications
• Court Records

PDF Embed API

Embed a PDF viewer directly into your applications. The Embed API allows for annotation of documents, collaboration and even PDF analytics. 

PDF Embed Pricing

Adobe’s PDF Embed API is free to use and can be up and running in minutes. Get started here. Documentation for the Embed API can also be viewed here.

Sign API

The Adobe Acrobat Sign API allows for the seamless integration of legally binding e-signatures into your apps, websites and workflows. The Sign API offers a wide variety of functionality to complete and manage your sign agreements.

Use the Acrobat Sign APIs to:

• Create and manage agreements
• Retrieve signed documents
• Embed a signing UI in your app
• Send reminders
• Create widgets
• Build reusable library documents
• Batch send documents in bulk
• Download audit trails
• Archive signed documents
• Leverage enterprise workflows in Acrobat across any device

PDF Services API

PDF Services encompasses a number of different APIs for PDF creation, conversion and transformation. Lets explore the many operations you can carry out with PDF Services API:

• Create a PDF: Create a PDF document from a variety of formats, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, ZIP, HTML, Image and URL. 
• Export a PDF: Convert your PDFs into new formats including, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and text files. 
• Combine PDFs: Combine up to 20 PDFs into a single PDF document. 
• OCR a PDF: Convert images to searchable text documents by leveraging  optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
• Compress PDFs: Reduce the size of your PDFs for easier sharing and rendering of documents. Provide a compression level for complete control on the size of your PDFs.
• Linearize a PDF: View larger documents in smaller increments to reduce bandwidth.
• Protect a PDF: Encrypt your PDFs by adding password protection to them. Place restrictions on modifications others can make to your PDFs.
• Remove protection from a PDF: Remove a password from a PDF. This can only be done by the owner's password.
• Insert pages: Add pages to an existing PDF.
• Replace pages: Replace pages in an existing document with new pages.
• Delete pages: Remove pages from a PDF.
• Reorder pages: Change the order of the pages in your document.
• Rotate pages: Rotate one or more pages in a document, allowing for portrait and landscape view pages.
• Split PDF: Split your existing PDFs into multiple PDFs. Documents can be split by number of pages, page ranges or pages per file.
• Get a PDF’s properties: Get the metadata properties of a PDF.

Power Automate Connector

Integrate the Adobe Acrobat Services APIs into your workflows with Power Automate. Build low code workflows that leverage Adobe’s full library of APIs along with connectors to all your backend systems.

Templates

Adobe and Microsoft offer a variety of different templates to enable your organization to start automating common workflows. See the full library of templates here.

Pricing

Get Started for Free

Anyone can get started with the Adobe Acrobat Services APIs with a free tier offering 500 Document transactions each month and access to 15 different APIs. Get access to the Acrobat Services APis here. 

Enterprise Licensing

If you’re looking to expand beyond 500 transactions per month, Adobe offers per-document transaction licensing. A document transaction is based on the initial endpoint request (i.e., API call) and the number of pages with the number of pages affecting the document transaction differently depending on the type of API. 

Pages per document transaction:

• Extract Operation: 1 Document Transaction for up to 5 pages
• Accessibility Auto-Tag Operation: 10 Document Transactions per page
• Electronic Seal Operation: 10 Document Transactions per PDF
• All other Operations: 1 Document Transaction for up to 50 pages

Security

Ensuring the security of data is essential to any solution leveraging the Acrobat Services APIs. Adobe has gone to great lengths to ensure data is encrypted and secure.

• By default, Adobe only stores uploaded documents for 24 hours after processing
• Adobe provides developers with the ability to remove the document immediately after processing.
• The Acrobat PDF Services have achieved the FedRAMP Tailored baseline.
• Administrators do not have direct access to any of the end-user’s documents or content stored in the Document Cloud services storage.
• By default, Document Cloud services encrypt user-generated content in transit with HTTPS TLS 1.2 encryption. At rest, content is encrypted with AES 256-bit symmetric security keys that are unique to each customer and each customer’s claimed domain.
• Additionally, administrators can add another layer of security for documents at-rest with a dedicated encryption key for some or all of the domains in the customer organization.

Documents uploaded to Document Cloud are generally stored in the regional data center that corresponds to the country code associated with the user uploading the data, regardless of identity type.