Visibility of content of form fields

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Neue-Wege
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Visibility of content of form fields

Post by Neue-Wege »

When customers send us pdfs in which they have filled in form fields, these are not displayed to me in the pdf-XChange editor. Adobe or even Edge have no problem with this.

Is there a way to see the fields in the XChange editor? I've searched all the settings but had no luck.

Thanks
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Visibility of content of form fields

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Neue-Wege,

Welcome to our forums.
We will need to see a sample document before we can advise further. If the files contain sensitive or personal information for your customers - can you please send the sample to support@pdf-xchange.com with a link back to this topic in the e-mail?

Kind regards,
Stefan
Neue-Wege
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Re: Visibility of content of form fields

Post by Neue-Wege »

Hello Stefan,

thanks for your fast reply. Attached you will find an example file without any personal data.

Kind regards
Christian
Attachments
Example form fields new.pdf
(1.05 MiB) Downloaded 22 times
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Visibility of content of form fields

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Neue-Wege,

Thanks for the sample file.
This PDF file contains a Static XFA form, and those are a bit different than usual PDF Form fields.
A colleague from the dev team noticed that Adobe's Acrobat Pro shows the fields empty as we do, however Adobe's free Acrobat Reader (as well as a few other products) do show the content. So this is now with another colleague who works on XFA forms for some further investigation and feedback!

Kind regards,
Stefan
DIV
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Re: Visibility of content of form fields

Post by DIV »

Tracker Supp-Stefan wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 2:52 pm This PDF file contains a Static XFA form
Interesting.
The [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFA#Compatibility]Wikipedia article[/url] states:
"Most PDF processors do not handle XFA content."
It also says
"The XML Forms Architecture was not standardized as an ISO standard, and has been deprecated in PDF 2.0."
...so does that mean that FFA forms should only be found in PDF files that were created based on a somewhat older version of the PDF standard?

—DIV
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Visibility of content of form fields

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello DIV,

XFA forms were developed by Adobe themselves to allow more 'interactive' forms than what the standard form fields (that are part of the PDF ISO specification) allow. They never made the XFA spec public - so supporting such forms by ourselves involved quite a bit of reverse engineering!
In PDF 2.0 (which is again an ISO spec) - XFA forms are not included.

So while you can create XFA forms now with Adobe's products - those files will be PDF 1.7 or lower version.
We support displaying those - however for XFA fields - it seems like there are two places where you can store information for their value. The stricter way to handle the situation when these two locations do not contain the same value is to display the information that we display (the 'empty' value in the above sample).
There are some applications that only write the other one. So ourselves and Adobe's Pro work the same way and display the value that should be displayed (even if it's empty) however these other tools out there that have decided that if either of the values is populated - they will display that (without updating the other one that we work with) are causing the reported behaviour.

I believe our devs are considering a solution that when the "wrong" of these two values is populated and the other one that we try to display is empty - we will copy the "other" one - and then display the correct. Though I am not sure if that is already in the works and when it might be implemented.

Kind regards,
Stefan
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