Developer 101. The proper way forward from Acrobat 5?

[bob3054983]

Out of utter frustration and exhaustion, I'm posting an open ended question, hoping to get in touch with someone from adobe to further discuss this issue.

I've been tasked with supporting a legacy application that uses Winforms to host an Acrobat 5 fillable form.  We have hundreds of pdf fillable forms with javascript logic, emphasis on *hundreds*, therefore we are heavily invested in Adobe.  (However, if we can not find a satisfactory solution to our issues we will be moving away from the Adobe platform).

The application basically presents the user with a fillable pdf, the user can fill out the pdf and save the results.  Very straight forward.

However, I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to upgrade and support our code to use the newer versions of Adobe and newer ways of saving the user choices.  We are tired of wasting hours and hours pouring through Adobe's voluminous documentation, that never really gets to the point nor provides answers to basic developers questions. 

By the way, the Adobe DC sdk is 99% worthless and is, by all definitions, a misnomer.  It is NOT an sdk of any kind and will leave the developer with more questions than answers.

[Michael Peters]

You refereed to Acrobat as "Crap" without any explanation of how you have come to that conclusion. I thought you were discussing SDKs and developer interfaces, there is nothing in your other posts about the functionality of the product itself. I don't work for Adobe, but I do work with some of the biggest companies in the world in my field who are also Adobes customers who have large numbers of Adobe Acrobat licenses. We also sell products to some of the biggest organisations in the world that use Adobe Acrobat, so the empirical data would generally point to this being a good product used by many millions of end users. I will therefore let the evidence to the contrary decide the argument.

[Michael Peters]

On the contrary, Adobe released the PDF file format as an ISO standard around the time of Acrobat 8 and there are now many 3rd party offerings out there. Leonard who has been in this discussion I believe is on that ISO committee. I see that you have used the "condescending, snooty, argumentative, and unhelpful" comments with other users on the Acrobat forum who are unpaid and freely give their time as I have to help you.

[bob3054983]

The moderators are protecting you from a true and proper response.  You sir, have not been helpful at all.

[Michael Peters]

Well why don't you just stick with Acrobat 5 then? Everyone on the world has this problem. New software releases come out and I don't just mean those from Adobe how about new versions of Microsoft Windows. The hardware gets updated - is this customer using operating systems and hardware from 18 years ago (I suspect not)? Are you still using the same car, phone etc from 18 years ago? You are seriously lucky that Adobe hasn't gone 64bit with Acrobat yet as with most other products it has and therefore you would have other issues to contend with. I know that in our business our issue for many years is that Acrobat versions have been too backwardly compatible which is why many of our customers are able to use their plug-ins over multiple versions of Acrobat without upgrading unlike a product like InDesign which requires plug-ins to be rebuilt for every new version. In that respect you have been lucky that your software has been running ok for as long as it has.

[Jon Fritz]

There's really no reason to continue this thread with this particular back and forth. If anyone sees a valid reason to unlock it, PM me.