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I recently had to use many different PDF documents with forms from my university. As a Linux user with a poppler-based PDF viewer, I could not edit some forms, and I could not even display others. There seem to be three different types of form regarding compatibility with other programs than the Adobe ones:

  1. Forms that are editable to full extent in every form-editing PDF viewer that I know (example 1).
  2. Forms that can be displayed in poppler-based PDF viewers, but cannot be edited properly – e. g. some dropdown fields can't be selected; entries that should be copied to other locations like address fields are not reproduced (example 2).
  3. Forms that can not even be displayed by any of my tested PDF viewers / editors except Master PDF Editor (Linux), the Adobe programs and Foxit PDF (both Windows). These forms also can only be edited properly in the Adobe programs in my case; Master PDF Editor e. g. does not calculate a sum on page 3 of example 3.

What are the technical causes for these different levels of interoperability?

Can the features of 2. and 3. be achieved with a PDF document that is fully compatible to virtually every PDF viewer like 1.?

Thank you for your suggestions!

P. S.: Please excuse that the example documents are German, I have linked directly to publicly available request documents from my university.

edfrank
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  • From what I can see the 'example 2' contains an XFA form and not an AcroForm. The former is a proprietary Adobe technology which is dropped in PDF 2.0 but has advanced features like dynamic forms (e.g. the semester drop-down is only filled in with possible values once the field left from it is filled out). The latter is the standard for simple PDF forms and support quite well with standard Linux PDF viewers. – gettalong Jun 16 '20 at 19:05
  • @gettalong: Thank you! I did not know about the two different form types. This seems to be the reason here. Possibly some features of XFA are implemented in Poppler, which would explain why I can display example 2 and can't display example 3. – edfrank Jun 17 '20 at 12:32

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