Getting started with certify

certify makes printable PDF certificates: awards, recognitions, completion certificates, anything that wants a border and a signature line. You give it some text and it hands back a PDF.

There is no LaTeX or Word or Canva underneath it. The package draws the page itself, so once R is installed nothing else has to be.

This guide assumes you have used R a little but do not write it for a living. If you would rather work from a script you can edit line by line, there is one included with the package:

file.edit(system.file("examples", "make-a-certificate.R", package = "certify"))

Install it once

install.packages("certify")

Then, at the start of every R session where you want to make certificates:

library(certify)

Your first certificate

One function does everything: make_certificate(). Only two arguments are required, path (where to save the file) and recipient (whose name goes on it). Everything else is optional.

make_certificate(
  path          = "~/Desktop/jane-doe.pdf",
  recipient     = "Jane A. Doe",
  title         = "Certificate of Achievement",
  award_name    = "Outstanding Student",
  organization  = "Northfield College",
  program       = "Bachelor of Arts in Political Science",
  citation      = paste(
    "in recognition of exceptional dedication, scholarship,",
    "and service to the academic community."
  ),
  academic_year = "2025-2026",
  signers       = list(
    list(name = "Alex Chair, Ph.D.", title = "Department Chair")
  )
)

The PDF lands wherever path says. "~/Desktop/jane-doe.pdf" puts it on your Desktop; a bare "jane-doe.pdf" puts it in whatever folder R is currently working in, which is easy to lose track of, so naming the folder is worth the few extra characters.

To leave a line off the certificate, delete that whole argument, comma and all. Drop program and the italic line under the award name disappears; drop academic_year and the year line goes away.

The one rule when editing these calls: change the words inside the quotation marks, and leave the quotation marks and commas where they are. A missing comma is the cause of most errors here.

Adding your logo

Point logo at a PNG file. The image goes in the header, and it takes the place of organization, so you do not need both.

make_certificate(
  path      = "~/Desktop/jane-doe.pdf",
  recipient = "Jane A. Doe",
  citation  = "in recognition of exceptional dedication and scholarship.",
  logo      = "~/Desktop/college-logo.png",
  signers   = list(
    list(name = "Alex Chair, Ph.D.", title = "Department Chair")
  )
)

Three things to know about the file itself.

It has to be a PNG. A .jpg, .svg, .pdf, or .eps will not work, and R will tell you so. Most institutions publish a PNG version of their logo on a brand or communications page. If all you have is another format, opening it in Preview (Mac) or Paint (Windows) and saving it as PNG is enough.

Use one with a transparent background if you can. The certificate paper is a warm off-white, so a logo saved on a solid white background shows up as a white rectangle sitting on cream. Files labeled “transparent” or “for use on color backgrounds” avoid this.

Give R the full path. Quotes around it, forward slashes even on Windows:

logo = "~/Desktop/college-logo.png"                 # Mac
logo = "C:/Users/yourname/Desktop/college-logo.png" # Windows

If you are not sure what the path is, run file.choose() in the console, pick the file, and R prints the path for you to copy.

Getting the size right

The logo is scaled to fit inside a box, and it keeps its proportions, so it never comes out stretched or squashed. The box is 2 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide by default, and whichever edge the logo reaches first is what limits it:

A square or vertical logo (a seal, a stacked logo with the name underneath) is limited by the height. It comes out 2 inches tall.
A long horizontal wordmark is limited by the width. It comes out 4.5 inches wide and correspondingly shorter.

Either way the logo stays inside the decorative border, and the ornamental divider moves up to sit just underneath it.

If the default looks wrong for your particular logo, change the box:

# smaller and more restrained
logo_height = 1.4

# let a wide wordmark run closer to the edges
logo_width = 6

# both at once
logo_height = 1.6, logo_width = 6

Numbers are inches, and the page is 11 inches across. Making these too large will crowd the title, so it is worth opening the PDF and looking after any change.

Paper size

The default page is 11 by 8.5 inches, US letter turned sideways, which prints as-is on ordinary paper. In the print dialog choose Actual Size rather than “Fit to Page”, which would shrink it slightly and add a white margin. The border sits far enough in from the edge that no printer clips it.

For anything else, name the size:

paper = "letter"    # 11 x 8.5    (the default)
paper = "a4"        # 11.69 x 8.27
paper = "legal"     # 14 x 8.5
paper = "tabloid"   # 17 x 11
paper = "a3"        # 16.54 x 11.69
paper = "a5"        # 8.27 x 5.83

All of them are landscape, and the whole design scales with the paper, so the type and ornaments grow on a large sheet instead of sitting letter-sized in the middle of it. For a size that is not on the list, give the dimensions in inches instead:

width = 12, height = 9

Colors

Three palettes come with the package:

theme = cert_theme_classic()   # navy and gold on parchment (the default)
theme = cert_theme_formal()    # black and silver on cream
theme = cert_theme_warm()      # burgundy and gold on warm cream

classic theme formal theme warm theme

To match your own institutional colors, build a palette with cert_theme(). Colors are hex codes, the # followed by six characters that most brand guides list. Only primary and accent really change the character of the page; the rest have sensible defaults you can ignore.

our_colors <- cert_theme(
  primary    = "#003366",   # borders and the big title
  accent     = "#c0a062",   # inner trim and the corner flourishes
  background = "#fbf8f1"    # the paper color
)

make_certificate(
  path      = "~/Desktop/jane-doe.pdf",
  recipient = "Jane A. Doe",
  logo      = "~/Desktop/college-logo.png",
  theme     = our_colors
)

Save that our_colors line at the top of your script and use theme = our_colors on every certificate you make.

Two signatures

Add a second entry to signers. The two signature lines sit side by side and the date moves underneath them. Two is the maximum.

signers = list(
  list(name = "Dana President", title = "President"),
  list(name = "Sam Secretary",  title = "Secretary")
)

A stack of certificates from a spreadsheet

For a ceremony or a whole class, put the names in a spreadsheet and hand the whole thing to make_certificates() (plural). It writes one PDF per row.

Save your list as a CSV with a recipient column. Add award_name and citation columns too if people are getting different awards or different wording; leave them out if everyone gets the same.

recipient	award_name	citation
Jane A. Doe	Outstanding Student	for exceptional scholarship.
John B. Smith	Outstanding Service	for years of devoted service.

roster <- read.csv("~/Desktop/roster.csv")

make_certificates(
  roster,
  dir = "~/Desktop/certificates",

  # everything below is the same on every certificate
  title         = "Certificate of Achievement",
  logo          = "~/Desktop/college-logo.png",
  academic_year = "2025-2026",
  signers       = list(
    list(name = "Alex Chair, Ph.D.", title = "Department Chair")
  )
)

That is the whole thing. Files are named after the recipient, so “Jane A. Doe” becomes jane-a-doe.pdf, and two people with the same name get -2 added rather than one quietly overwriting the other.

A few details worth knowing:

Any column named after a make_certificate() argument is used. A column named something else is ignored, and you get a message listing what was ignored, which is how you catch a misspelled heading.
An empty cell falls back to whatever you passed for the whole batch.
If a column and an argument have the same name, the column wins.
To control the file names yourself, add a filename column.

Other things you can change

show_laurels = FALSE            # drop the decorative sprigs beside the name

width = 11.69, height = 8.27    # A4 landscape instead of US letter

date_str = "May 2026"           # otherwise the current month and year

presented_text = "Awarded to"   # the small italic line above the name

When something goes wrong

“Logo not found at: …” — the path is wrong, or the file moved. Run file.exists("your/path/here.png"). If it says FALSE, R is not looking where you think it is. file.choose() will give you the correct path.

The logo comes out as a white block. The PNG has a white background rather than a transparent one. See the note above.

A warning about cairo, or R crashes when writing the PDF. Some machines are missing the graphics library certify prefers. Add device = "pdf" to the call and it uses the plain PDF engine instead. The only difference you will notice is that en-dashes and curly quotes get simplified to plain ones.

make_certificate(
  path      = "~/Desktop/jane-doe.pdf",
  recipient = "Jane A. Doe",
  device    = "pdf"
)

unexpected symbol or unexpected ','. Almost always a missing comma between arguments, or a missing closing quotation mark. Look at the line R names and the one just above it.

Nothing seems to happen. make_certificate() writes a file and prints nothing. That is success. Look in the folder you named in path.