XFA forms are XML-based forms created by Adobe's LiveCycle Designer tool. They offer enhanced features over the old AcroForms method of creating fillable PDF forms with things like growable text fields (which can overflow across page boundaries) and "Rich Text," which is a subset of XHTML and CSS for stylizing text. There is also support for running JavaScript and FormCalc (a proprietary scripting language) scripts for manipulating data using a
"Scripting Object Model" (SOM - looks sort of like XPath). Other features include network interaction with servers (e.g. form submission) using HTTP or WSDL/SOAP. I believe you can also embed regular PDF documents inside XFA.
I don't pretend to understand XFA (the standard is here), but I have had to deal with it recently as it seems to be the direction that Adobe is pushing towards as until very recently (with the latest version of iText), the only reliable way of manipulating these forms were with Adobe's LiveCycle Server product (epic $). And so far, the only renderer that I've used that can even display them is Adobe Acrobat.
I see XFA has been mentioned on the Mozilla wiki and on the mailing list and it looks like there is some trepidation in supporting it as it is still a proprietary standard. If this is still the case, does that mean that pull requests would also not be accepted relating to XFA?
I can totally understand why you would not want to support a proprietary and complicated standard, but thought I would bring it up anyway as it's frustrating being locked into Adobe Reader and LiveCycle Server products. Thanks!
XFA forms are XML-based forms created by Adobe's LiveCycle Designer tool. They offer enhanced features over the old AcroForms method of creating fillable PDF forms with things like growable text fields (which can overflow across page boundaries) and "Rich Text," which is a subset of XHTML and CSS for stylizing text. There is also support for running JavaScript and FormCalc (a proprietary scripting language) scripts for manipulating data using a
"Scripting Object Model" (SOM - looks sort of like XPath). Other features include network interaction with servers (e.g. form submission) using HTTP or WSDL/SOAP. I believe you can also embed regular PDF documents inside XFA.
I don't pretend to understand XFA (the standard is here), but I have had to deal with it recently as it seems to be the direction that Adobe is pushing towards as until very recently (with the latest version of iText), the only reliable way of manipulating these forms were with Adobe's LiveCycle Server product (epic $). And so far, the only renderer that I've used that can even display them is Adobe Acrobat.
I see XFA has been mentioned on the Mozilla wiki and on the mailing list and it looks like there is some trepidation in supporting it as it is still a proprietary standard. If this is still the case, does that mean that pull requests would also not be accepted relating to XFA?
I can totally understand why you would not want to support a proprietary and complicated standard, but thought I would bring it up anyway as it's frustrating being locked into Adobe Reader and LiveCycle Server products. Thanks!