{"id":932,"date":"2014-10-01T23:13:48","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T21:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/?p=932"},"modified":"2014-10-01T23:23:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T21:23:29","slug":"adobe-xfa-forms-do-not-work-no-really-adobe-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/archives\/932","title":{"rendered":"Adobe XFA forms do not work, no really, Adobe sucks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our friendly tax collector has automated their personal inefficiencies into a relatively efficient system called SARS e-viling<\/a>.\u00a0 This amazing system allows you to confess your tax sins, after which they will perform their happy little calculations and tell you whether you owe money or not.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, their site worked on anything that ran “flash”, but lately their site doesn’t work in more and more browsers – it did however work in Google Chrome.<\/p>\n

Once the tax man knows your height, weight and how much he can hit you for, his e-viling site says “Download your assessment” or something, and provides a .PDF file called GetNotice.pdf<\/strong>.\u00a0 I downloaded the file and discovered that … it doesn’t work.<\/p>\n

Inside the PDF is the following text:<\/p>\n

To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade\r\nto the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com\/products\/acrobat\/readstep2.html\r\nFor further support, go to www.adobe.com\/support\/products\/acrreader.html<\/pre>\n
That’s it.\u00a0 You can follow the links to your heart’s content, but one thing you will not find is … anything to use this amazing file on Linux (never mind BSD and more esoteric operating systems).<\/p>\n
The reason for this is that the PDF includes XML Form Architecture Forms (XFA Forms).\u00a0 Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, added this extension without telling anyone how it works outside of Adobe products.\u00a0 Things that used to work (PDF’s) now suddenly do not, unless you happen to use Adobe’s latest and greatest offering.  Of course, everyone wants to install Adobe’s software, don’t they? so the form extensions have no backward compatibility, except to tell you they have no backward compatibility.  To see what they say as a document that you don’t want to edit, you have one choice, and only one choice, and that is to install whatever it is that Adobe is offering.<\/p>\n
Now this is why Adobe sucks<\/strong>: they used to provide this program for Linux.\u00a0 With this edition of their bloated software, they could tell the folks who forked out the big bucks for the Adobe form designer that their forms and stuff work on all sorts of platform.\u00a0 Now they have stopped supporting Linux.\u00a0 That’s interesting.\u00a0 However, you cannot<\/em> get the old software that did<\/em> work.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry though if you are running Windows XP – an operating system that nobody loves anymore (except armies of botnet herders) – Adobe will support your malware infested system with fresh application software forever, even though your operating system software is teetering on the edge of oblivion, and has already been abandoned by its manufacturer.\u00a0 For this operating system, they supply their software, but for a current version of Linux, they have removed<\/strong> their support.\u00a0 You can’t even download the one that worked.<\/p>\n
This means that it’s broken, and it’s not getting fixed.\u00a0 They broke it on purpose.\u00a0 Since they did it without a word about why or what, I can only assume that …<\/p>\n