Display issues for XFA-based PDF forms

[Sally5FC1]

I am using Windows 10, and use Chrome as brower, have the latest version Acrobat Reader DC on my computer. Try to open an application Form from a website but get an error message as follows:

"The document you are trying to load requires Adobe Reader 8 or higher. You may not have the Abode Reader installed or your viewing environment may not be properly configured to use Adobe Reader. Please see http://www.adobe.com/go/pdf_forms_configure"

I followed this link and refer to configure for Chrome; it asks to go to chrome://plugins/, but when I did I got error message 'this site can't be reached; the webpage might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently'.

What else I can do?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Most PDF viewers (especially browser-based ones) do not support viewing or filling in of  XFA-based PDF forms.

If you use Chrome, you must configure Chrome to download PDF files instead of opening them in Chrome. (The URL you see is obsolete, sorry!)

(1)    Click on the 3-dot icon on the top right of the Chrome browser window and select Settings.

(2)    Select Privacy and security on the left side of the window and click on Site settings.

(3)    Click on Additional content settings at the bottom on the screen.

(4)    Click on PDF documents and enable the option to Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome.

At this point, PDF files will be downloaded to your Downloads directory or wherever you choose to store the PDF file. Then open that directory, double click the file icon of the desired file and it will open up in Adobe Acrobat Reader (or if you have the full Acrobat product, in either Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Standard) assuming you have set Windows to use that software to be the default PDF file handler.

Voila, problem solved!

[Arvind24639309j7t7]

Voila! Problem not solved. I opened the PDF using Adobe Acrobat DC Pro 2022 and still have the same problem. 

[Test Screen Name]

Did you download it by printing to PDF? If so, don't do that!

[Jose Rosas-Perez]

Enable XFA in google by entering the following chrome://flags/#pdf-xfa-forms and enable it and then click on the relaunch button.

[Emilee04]

Hi all! I have previously played with the chrome://flags option and I wanted to give my thoughts in case it helps anyone. This plug-in opens XFA forms in the Chrome browser but be aware as it actually opens a view of the file as what I believe to be an HTML view of the form (if this is wrong, please feel free to correct me but its not retaining all of the XFA functionality). If you try to fill it out the form in the browser it will produce unexpected results. For example, we have buttons (email, print, reset) in the Designer Master Pages in the top part of our forms that do not work in this view. Another example is an email obect in the main area that cut my user entered data to a multi-line value when there is plenty of room, and in Designer its not set to multi-line. I also noticed that some fields do not flow when you show/hide or add objects. The good news is that, you can download this file to your computer then open it in Acrobat where it returns to the original XFA file. However, if you try to fill it out within the browser, I dont see a way to save your work, you can only download where your entered values are not saved. Just wanted to respectfully make note of a couple of things that I've noticed with this option. (attached are examples) 🙂 Please let us know if anyone has better more updated information. Have a great day!

[Jose Rosas-Perez]

Sorry for the late reply nowackem. Microsoft Edge now have the XFA option.To enable this feature, type Edge://flags/xfa in Microsoft Edge.  See the attachment below. 

[adobe770]

Firefox now supports XFA by default, try that one.