I was forced to fill out an XFA form (that was pretending to be a PDF) from the Canadian government and the experience left me feeling completely subjugated. The lengths that Adobe go to to make sure that you have the most frustrating experience possible is unbelieveable. Searching for alternatives or help leads you to either: be forced to buy their premium software (or a licensed equivalent) or subscribe for Adobe’s online tools. Why is this propriety format allowed in government forms? What is so fantastic/irreplaceable about this format?
Governments really should be forced to use open formats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFA
“In 2017 the ISO Committee deprecated XFA from PDF 2.0.[4]”
Adobe is a bloated garbage company that hasn’t truly innovated in a decade, they’re just hoarding their proprietary tools and formats to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible.
Their CMS and their analytics are fucking awful. Such a convoluted mess. They make all the wrong decisions, and then criticize when you don’t use their recommended approach. They don’t even understand the basics of good website development, why would we follow their recommendations?
I work for the Canadian government, and these are horrible. They worm their way into everything. We are slaves to proprietary formats. There is very little will to switch to open standards for something like this.
I’m glad that not everyone is oblivious to my suffering! Thanks for the validation!
I wish you the very best of luck climbing the ranks of your position and straightening this BS
That’s not really the progression track for me personally, but I’ll at least keep beating the drum about this problem.
Thanks for fighting the good fight in any government. Bring it to people’s attention when you can and its not too out of place. Some people might genuinely not know about this and even if they don’t make it better at least there’s some chance you stopped them from making it worse.
Unfortunately, certain things have actually become codified institutions in the government. Like the way we handle digitally signed forms is with a proprietary Adobe Acrobat plugin.
Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.
Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.
Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.
If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.
Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.
As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.
That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.
We like to say “nobody ever gets fired for buying [Microsoft|Adobe|Oracle]”. Basically, if you buy shitty proprietary stuff from a company that is known for making shitty proprietary stuff, it’s not a surprise. If you take a risk on an open alternative, you are somehow staking your own reputation on the success of it. We’ve been burned countless times by the corporate software world, but we keep crawling back because nobody in the government (or most orgs) cares about software freedom.
What is so fantastic/irreplaceable about this format?
Adobe profitting off your misery. That the Canadian govt is using it makes me think if the adoption was similar to how things usually happen down here in Brazil: new head of IT has a “great idea” (which he suspiciously got after meeting with a representative of a company) and demands it to be implemented ASAP. 3 months later, with everything needing the “great thing”, head of IT is dismissed from his position, everyone else hates the new thing, but now it’s completely rooted into half the digital workflows.
Before you post a snappy “just do X” or “try this software” try it yourself consent-letter-2123.pdf my complaint is not trivial.
There’s a plain PDF right above the form you posted. Why didn’t you link the page where its from?
I did realize much later that there was an alternative form, which makes sense and I kind of now assume that most of these forms probably have an alternative equivalent that is not dynamic or interactive. In the begining I was sent the link to the form directly by my wife (she is the Canadian) so I struggled for a while with it before I decided to look for any alternative. This still frustrates me because the XFA version is supposed to make the process easier not more complicated!
Ah, that makes sense. I’m glad that all worked out in the end.
I thought there was already a format for form-fillable PDFs that does work with other software. I wonder why they can’t just keep using that?
I can see how a single dynamic form can replace several plain PDF forms because not all parts of the form apply to every user. (For the record I did end up using the XFA form as dictated by Adobe and I am lucky that I have everything you need, a full fat computer and a printer, to make it work. If you wanted to do this digitally on your iPad you would have to find an alternative)
Very disappointed that the Canadian government uses them so much. I’m open to changing my mind if there is an explanation as to why this format is irreplaceable. Like maybe it offers some security feature or the like?
I have a form like this I do regularly for work. I actually fax the form, I don’t even send it electronically. But I like to fill it electronically so I have my records on the computer. Because it is 2023. I had to use my home computer (linux) to generate a copy of the form, then use a floss editor I managed to get working on windows work computer to annotate on top of the form fields. For some reason it’s really hard to get the annotations to line up with the form fields. So sometimes I have to correct it by hand after printing to clarify.
It is a zero security form, there is no need to have all this rigamarole. The form is freely available on the internet and anyone with a fucking fax machine could fill it in and send it on behalf of anyone else. Fax machine is the biggest hurdle; who the hell has one of those.
This probably isn’t the case in all places, but basically all of the libraries in my area have a fax machine that you can use. A godsend when your only choice is either a fax or a web submission that may or may not work properly.
OP’s form is even worse. I can’t even view the form with any of the normal methods.
So even printing and completing manually wouldn’t work.
Fill it out like a paper form using a stylus or the text-typing-feature in handwriting programs, and let them deal themselves with it 💁
https://travel.gc.ca/docs/child/consent-letter-2123.pdf Open the form and try it yourself. What you are saying doesn’t work for this form. You need the scripts embedded in the form to create the final consent letter.
Took a bit of looking around, but it looks like this may work:
Adobe does sell licences for other companies to use the XFA format but even the software you linked has a free reader that pushes you to the paid full version. Also not FOSS.
Horrible. Same goes for government 's WhatsApp Bots to get appointments or consult status for your paperwork, like driving license and the likes.
Not a Canadian, but yikes. I can’t imagine having to use Adobe to fill out government forms.
deleted by creator
https://travel.gc.ca/docs/child/consent-letter-2123.pdf I was exactly in your position before I had to use this document! I was confident that a government form would not be this complicated but a big part of my frustration was that I was trying to solve the issue as if it was a PDF problem but PDF is an open standard and there are plenty of excellent FOSS tools and programs that can do anything you can imagine with a PDF. This form is an imposter!
deleted by creator
Feels very hostile right? I assume that all these smart XFA forms still have an online legacy dumb equivalent that is far less easy to use (both for the user and the government)
To be honest it’s making my phishing senses go off. Javascript shouldn’t be in a PDF/XFA/whatever basically ever, but it’s why PDF is a potential malware risk
Same with MacOS Preview, which normally handles everything PDF-related
That just shows how dishonest Adobe is being. For example if a form was named “gov-form.xfa” instead of “gov-form.pdf” then my whole expectation would be different as it is obviously not a PDF and so I shouldn’t treat it as such.
deleted by creator
Also to your point about not having an issue with Firefox, I read that Firefox recently implemented an XFA reader in their browser but the issue is that most of the javascript is not supported so the functionality of the form is not guaranteed to work.
Not a government form, but I had to convert one of the forms in my workplaces hiring package so that new hires could even open it.
Fortunately easy to do it you have Adobe installed, but it does require it for the initial conversion.
Where you able to convert the form into an open format and also preserve all the original functionality? If this is true then there is absolutely no excuse for these forms not being offered in alternative formats. There are some tools that will let you ‘flatten’ an XFA form to a static PDF but this destroys all the dynamic parts of the original.
No, it got rid of all the dynamic parts. For my purposes they weren’t needed, as it was mostly for a poorly implemented embedded print button, and locking fields to certain data types.
Completely pointless, because most people here literally just print the pdf and fill it by hand still.
