Mass creation of pdf certificates

July 12, 2017 10:16 AM

The unit I work in does training workshops of various sorts. We like to offer our attendees a certificate of completion after they attend. Right now I'm hand creating these individually using a PDF template using Acrobat Pro, then locking it to editing, password protecting, saving, emailing, yadda. It's a lot of work. I'd like to automate. Halp.

I can easily generate a csv of attendee names, dates, workshop name, all the info we put on the certificate. The certificate that gets spat out needs to have our unit logo on it, and image of the signature of our director. We usually email these certificates individually to attendees.

As much of this as can be automated, I'm all ears. If there's a service that does stuff like this, that's fine. Even if it costs a little money, I bet I could rustle some up. We're about to hit our big training season again and I'm getting tired just thinking about the dozens upon dozens of certificates I'm going to be needing to generate.

posted by soren_lorensen to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Does it have to start as PDF? If not, set up the certificate in Word, use mail merge to bring in names and any other info, print to PDF, then use a separate program (I can't recall names, but I know they're out there) to "explode" the multi-page PDF into individual pages. From there it'd be a little work to preview each certificate to make sure you're sending the right one to the right people, but definitely less work than you're doing now.

I've seen systems that auto-generate and email certificates, usually for e-learning courses, so what you want is definitely out there, though.
posted by okayokayigive at 10:21 AM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

This might be creating another problem, but if you have anyone handy with R, they can easily do this with R Markdown. (I'm doing it for letters for research participants!)
posted by quadrilaterals at 10:42 AM on July 12, 2017

If you can find a developer resource, there are open source utilities that let can easily merge csv data with PDF templates. https://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/ there are options to 'flatten' the PDF so its not easily editable and if you truly want to automate it, you can have it send it to a printer or email after the merge.
posted by edman at 10:47 AM on July 12, 2017

Maybe I've got the wrong idea about template, but when I hear template, I think of a setup where you have fields for name, date, workshop name (all text boxes), and two graphics - unit logo and signature.

If that's the case, that can definitely be automated in a handful of programming languages (C# or java - done it in those). I'd think Adobe Pro has some kind of automation as well.
posted by k5.user at 10:49 AM on July 12, 2017

Best answer: This is easy if you have access to Publisher.

Drop your template PDF certificate into Publisher.
Add the Unit Logo & Signature Image Where necessary.
Create Mail Merge Fields for all of the fields you are going to merge in.
Mail Merge it using your spreadsheet.

Optional - Create all certificates as new project pages before printing, just to be able to digitally look over them (in case of weird formatting issues.

Print. - Either to PDF or Hard Copy.

Enjoy.
posted by RhysPenbras at 11:03 AM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Re: exploding or splitting the PDF into multiple files - I use SmallPDF all the time to do this. Lots of other nifty tools on there too.
posted by teststrip at 11:45 AM on July 12, 2017