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I need to fill up a pdf with XFA forms. Okular says that or does not support XFA forms.

Xreader displays the following message and asks to install Adobe Reader.

If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF
viewer may not be able to display this type of document.

Is there pdf reader (not a pdf editor which actually draws on the document) in Ubuntu that supports XFA forms?

This is not a duplicate of Is there software that can fill PDF forms? because answers in that question do not address XFA forms (as mentioned in some comments).

Archisman Panigrahi
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  • Does this answer your question? How to open a PDF form file that says Please wait...? – Robie Basak Nov 10 '20 at 11:30
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    @RobieBasak I don't think this is duplicate of that. While that is related to XFA forms, the question does not directly address that. It may be harder to find it (because the warning - "use latest version of Adobe Reader to open this PDF" has changed, and the content of the warning also depends on the pdf viewer) – Archisman Panigrahi Nov 10 '20 at 12:28
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    The root cause is the same for both questions though. The set of correct answers would be exactly the same. So it would serve the community to mark the duplicate, because then the answers could be collated together, and both of the questions would serve as signposts to those same answers. – Robie Basak Nov 10 '20 at 12:56

2 Answers2

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Non Free software

I was searching for the same thing and came across this answer at Stack Exchange:

The accepted answer to download and install Master PDF editor worked for me.

Free Software

Support for XFA forms was recently implemented in mozilla/pdf.js. It would be available in Firefox 91 onwards.

This part of the answer was written before Firefox 91 was released.

  1. Download the latest Firefox Nightly appimage.
  2. Open about:config and set pdfjs.enableXfa preference to true.
Archisman Panigrahi
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Al F
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  • Sad to see that so far no free software supports it. I have reopened this bug report in Okular. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263042 – Archisman Panigrahi Nov 05 '19 at 19:51
  • Comment #9 at that bug report states that XFA forms are deprecated in PDF 2.0. If that's right, maybe (hopefully!) the need for this workaround will disappear. – Al F Nov 05 '19 at 23:58
  • Yes, pdf 2.0 it was released in 2017. I will still take a long time to be widely used. Latex produces pdf 1.5 by default. Let's see what happens. – Archisman Panigrahi Nov 06 '19 at 07:56
  • The method is probably as follows under Linux as under Windows: 1 edit by M.PDF E. (Linux) or Tools like "PDF-XChange Editor", then 2. send to a PDF printer. With 2. I'm having problems here on Linux. – SL5net Jul 01 '20 at 19:59
  • Thank you so much! I would still be rebooting into windows to fill in and sign pdfs. Would prefer access to my adobe signature, but can't have it all I guess. – Josh C Oct 19 '23 at 18:47
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I think Document Viewer can edit XFA Forms. I'm not sure if it's pre-installed on Ubuntu, but it was preinstalled for me on Fedora Silverblue.

programmerRaj
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  • Yes, I can't find any source or mention in the docs that confirm that, but Evince worked just fine when dealing with XFA forms. – Clément Mar 29 '24 at 22:20