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There's a ton of PDF forms that I deal with at work that only work with Adobe Acrobat. When I open them in other PDF viewers, it'll be a single page telling me
by bitvoid 3y ago
There's a ton of PDF forms that I deal with at work that only work with Adobe Acrobat. When I open them in other PDF viewers, it'll be a single page telling me that if the PDF doesn't load in a few seconds then my PDF viewer is not compatible with the document.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine that they were created with Acrobat and it embeds some (proprietary) stuff in the PDF that only works with Acrobat. Acrobat is also the only PDF client that I'm aware of that supports signing PDF forms with certificates. There's other features in some PDFs that I've encountered that'll only work in Acrobat as well, like buttons embedded in the PDF to email the form or dropdowns in the form that don't work in other viewers.
It seems pretty swampy to me when 90% of the PDF forms I deal with can only be (fully) completed in Acrobat.
- azinman2 3y agoI’ve never come across this. What kind of business?
- jasomill 3y agoUsing JavaScript, it's easy to create a standards-compliant PDF with inconsistent behavior in popular viewers. For example, https://jasomill.at/HelloGoodbye.pdf contains JavaScript that, per the spec, should display a pop-up alert ("Hello Acrobat <version>") when it is opened and another ("Goodbye Acrobat <version>") when it is closed. Actual behavior is inconsistent. On my Mac: Acrobat: both alerts display Preview, Safari: neither alert displays Chrome, Edge, Firefox: only open alert displays