Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo)

Governmental XFA #PDF forms come from some special type of hell.

Surprisingly, some of them do work in #GNOME Papers / #Evince / #Okular. It seems like a few corner cases remain where only some forms refuse to load, so I filed a ticket in #Poppler with a neat reference table and sample files today. In case this is useful to anyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/1481

[samples] Some PDF forms from the Canadian federal government do not show their contents, stuck at "Please wait..." asking to upgrade to Adobe Reader (#1481) · Issues · poppler / poppler · GitLab

On this page, I found some PDF forms to test with Okular, Papers and Evince running Poppler 23.08.0. Many of...

GitLab
Apr 4, 2024 at 8:55pmTuba
Show threadPhilip KiffApr 4, 2024

@nekohayo XFA Forms do indeed live in a special form of hell!

It doesn't help that the Canadian government is inexplicably using software that is 20 years old to create the sample forms you found. [eyeroll]

#XFA #PDF #Forms

Show threadMonokaMay 5, 2024

#Okular seems to tackle the issue of #Javascript in #PDF #Forms / #XFA in this year's #GSOC. Hopefully, the developers of #Gnome #Papers / #Evince are aware of this to join forces with Pratham Gandhi.

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2024/projects/ERNaxjrw

#GnomePapers #PDFForms #Linux #PDFReader

@pkiff @nekohayo

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Show threadTJun 15, 2024
@nekohayo Thank you for finding this! I am filling said forms right now and it is indeed a kind of hell.
Show threadJeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo)Jun 15, 2024
@devT I do some consulting work in that area to help folks with paperwork, so I know all too well how annoyingly restrictive those Canadian immigration forms can be. I just wish that someday I'll be able to fill them natively with FLOSS apps on Linux and wouldn't need Adobe Reader anymore, because it's ridiculous to be remote-desktoping or virtualizing a whole OS just to fill PDFs.