I was forced to fill out an XFA form (that was pretending to be a PDF) from the Canadian government and the experience left me feeling completely subjugated. The lengths that Adobe go to to make sure that you have the most frustrating experience possible is unbelieveable. Searching for alternatives or help leads you to either: be forced to buy their premium software (or a licensed equivalent) or subscribe for Adobe’s online tools. Why is this propriety format allowed in government forms? What is so fantastic/irreplaceable about this format?
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https://travel.gc.ca/docs/child/consent-letter-2123.pdf I was exactly in your position before I had to use this document! I was confident that a government form would not be this complicated but a big part of my frustration was that I was trying to solve the issue as if it was a PDF problem but PDF is an open standard and there are plenty of excellent FOSS tools and programs that can do anything you can imagine with a PDF. This form is an imposter!
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Feels very hostile right? I assume that all these smart XFA forms still have an online legacy dumb equivalent that is far less easy to use (both for the user and the government)
Same with MacOS Preview, which normally handles everything PDF-related
That just shows how dishonest Adobe is being. For example if a form was named “gov-form.xfa” instead of “gov-form.pdf” then my whole expectation would be different as it is obviously not a PDF and so I shouldn’t treat it as such.
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To be honest it’s making my phishing senses go off. Javascript shouldn’t be in a PDF/XFA/whatever basically ever, but it’s why PDF is a potential malware risk
Also to your point about not having an issue with Firefox, I read that Firefox recently implemented an XFA reader in their browser but the issue is that most of the javascript is not supported so the functionality of the form is not guaranteed to work.
Not a government form, but I had to convert one of the forms in my workplaces hiring package so that new hires could even open it.
Fortunately easy to do it you have Adobe installed, but it does require it for the initial conversion.
Where you able to convert the form into an open format and also preserve all the original functionality? If this is true then there is absolutely no excuse for these forms not being offered in alternative formats. There are some tools that will let you ‘flatten’ an XFA form to a static PDF but this destroys all the dynamic parts of the original.
No, it got rid of all the dynamic parts. For my purposes they weren’t needed, as it was mostly for a poorly implemented embedded print button, and locking fields to certain data types.
Completely pointless, because most people here literally just print the pdf and fill it by hand still.