Why I cannot sign XFA?

[noxfanever]

And why a decade later it's still not implemented, just empty promises and nothing of value?

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi, noxfanever

it is not trivial, the format is deprecated, and we have higher priorities.

The ISO 32000-2:2017 standard (PDF 2.0) explicitly deprecated XFA, removing it from the core PDF specification. This means XFA features should not be written into new PDF 2.0 documents and must be ignored by compliant readers.

We have seen a great deal of improvement and many new features in the product over the last 10 years, I do not agree with your assessment of the dev team's hard work.

Please let whoever is sending you XFA forms to sign know that they should stop using that format and move to the new standards that changed, also almost a decade ago.

[noxfanever]

Yes, that would be the US government

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf

Lemme just call Trump and ask him to update the government forms.

viewtopic.php?p=199313&hilit=XFA#p199313

Just recently you said it's not ready, now you just blame companies for using it. I don't understand why you won't own up to your promises? A decade ago you said it's being worked on, now it's suddnely outdated and whatever.

EDIT: Called the president team, too busy masking epstein files but said that PDF XChange should add XFA as he won't add XFA

[Sean - PDF-XChange]

Hi noxfanever,

Our commitment, like that of many other PDF software companies, is to follow the International Standards Organisation's guidelines with regard to PDF structure and compatibility. As a result, we are not obliged to support XFA. I do understand the frustration, especially when you need to work with forms from organizations that still rely on XFA, such as the IRS.

From a technical standpoint, the situation has not really changed. XFA was a proprietary technology and was later deprecated in the PDF 2.0 specification (ISO 32000-2). Supporting it fully requires implementing a very large and complex subsystem that behaves more like a form runtime environment than a typical PDF feature. For that reason, many modern PDF applications do not implement full XFA support.

Our development team did investigate XFA support in the past, but given its complexity, declining industry support, and the fact that it is deprecated in the current PDF standard, it has not been prioritized for implementation. Instead, development effort has focused on features that apply to the broader PDF ecosystem.

We appreciate the feedback and understand that the continued use of XFA by some institutions creates inconvenience for users. However, because the format is deprecated and largely phased out of the modern PDF standard, the situation is unlikely to change in the near future.

Kind regards,