.form files empty

[Michael36162560o0aa]

Hello,

I have a user who has some old .form files from 2004 that have no data in them when they are opened. They swear up and down they all should have filled out information on the fillable forms. Is it possible that the age of the file is causing compatibility, and if so how would I go about making the file compatible with Adobe Acrobat Cloud?

[MikelKlink]

If the PDFs with those forms had technically been correctly built, I doubt that problem would occur. But in all times there were PDFs that were a bit incorrect built. And different viewers (and also different versions of the same viewers) may handle such PDFs with errors differently. 

To know for sure, we'd need the PDFs for analysis.

[try67]

If they are .form files then they are not PDFs. Most likely FormLabs PreForm Job forms.

But you can find out quite easily. Open them in a plain-text editor, like Notepad. If the first line is not "%PDF-X.Y" (X and Y being numbers), then it's not a PDF file.

[Michael36162560o0aa]

I just checked and it has %PDF-1.2 when you open in Notepad.

[try67]

OK, then rename it from .form to .pdf and try opening in Acrobat or Reader.

[Michael36162560o0aa]

We can already open the forms with Adobe. The problem is there is data in the forms. It's not retaining the filled in data that was previously there. The client swears data was there before.

[try67]

Can you share a sample file?