Use DocuSign anchor tab (auto-place) tagging to automatically position form fields in envelopes
domain: developers.docusign.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Identify the anchor strings in your document — unique text fragments (e.g., /sig1/, Date:, Initials:) that reliably appear where you want a field placed; anchor matching is case-insensitive and requires exact whole-string matches with no wildcards
When creating the envelope, define tabs in the recipient's tabs object; for each tab, set anchorString to your chosen text fragment and configure anchorXOffset and anchorYOffset (in points) to fine-tune the field position relative to the anchor text
Set anchorIgnoreIfNotPresent to true for optional fields so that missing anchor strings do not cause the envelope creation to fail
Send the envelope as normal; DocuSign locates every instance of the anchor string across all document pages and places the tab relative to each match
Test anchor placement in the DocuSign developer sandbox by downloading the completed document and verifying tab positions; adjust offsets if fields overlay text or are positioned on the wrong side of the anchor
Known gotchas
Anchor strings with multiple occurrences in the document will receive a tab at every occurrence; use unique delimiter strings (e.g., /signer1_sig/) in template documents rather than common words
Anchor matching ignores case but does not support partial matches or regular expressions; if your document has slight variations in the anchor text (e.g., 'Date:' vs 'Date :'), each variation requires its own anchor definition
Anchor tagging interacts with template automatic template matching; if your envelope also uses a DocuSign template with pre-defined tabs, the two sets of tabs merge and may produce duplicate fields on the same anchor
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