Signing XFA PDF Forms

[TJNEW]

We have recently started migrating our users from Adobe Acrobat to PDF-Xchange Editor (Plus) and overall, this has been very successful with users actually preferring PDF-Xchange to Acrobat. However, we recently discovered an issue that is putting a wrench in the works - the need to digitally sign secure XFA forms. We do a lot of contract business with the US military and it seems as though the military either mandates or otherwise requires XFA forms - in any case, these XFA forms originate from them and we cannot ask them to change formats.

After we encountered problems attempting to sign these XFA forms in PDF-Xchange, I searched online and see that apparently this is a known limitation with the PDF-Xchange Editor. I note that there has been some discussion on the topic and a resolution is "in the works" with no ETA.

Just figured that I would throw this out there in hopes that it motivates PDF Xchange to prioritize the XFA issues - because I really want to dump Adobe completely

Thanks!

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, TJNEW

Thank you for the post, and while the support is appreciated, I am sorry to say this topic is not slow due to a lack of motivation (far from it infact).
XFA is notoriously complex, and signing is a highly sensitive feature, which doing incorrectly could have catastrophic consequences - beyond both of those is the reality that we have a very small development team, with only 2 "experts" on signing, while XFA is new territory that still needs to be learned - inbetween all the urgent tasks that come up and interrupt them.

This development is absolutely a very high priority item, and it will be implemented when it is ready. The unfortunate reality however, is that this could still be years away. We need to ensure that signing XFA is "feature complete" and able to work not only with the current iteration of XFA files, but that signing will work properly (or within an acceptable margin of error) even in older XFA files used before the current specifications came along.
Countless files still in use today are using the earliest forms of XFA formatting for "that little bit of extra" functionality that was offered by acrobat at the time (by breaking their own formats specification) until it was finally accepted and documented by the ISO in the past few years.

Prior to that documentation, all XFA handling we offered had been reverse engineered to "work as best it could" with a large number of assumptions about how acrobat would do A or B, and ALOT of sample files.
Now that this is part of the specification, they have been putting in the rounds learning it, and adjusting our previous "solutions" into properly written XFA handlers (much of this happens silently as it does not result in any change in functionality or desired usability from a user perspective).

Long before we can offer the ability to place a signature ourselves, we need to ensure that we can see when a signature is already present, and actually display it in the document as intended (for many files, we currently cannot do either). It certainly would not do, to let you place a signature in a file where you cannot tell if that field is already signed by someone else, and you wouldn't be able to see your own signature after it was placed.

Kind regards,