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Solving PDF form challenges and boosting workflow automation

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Very few modern organizations do not count PDFs as a critical component of their processes. Perhaps they take the ubiquitous PDF for granted. However, when they stop to think about it, they would have to agree that PDFs play a critical role across their entire organization—from contracts to regulatory submissions to transactional records. Even though PDFs play such an instrumental role in ensuring consistent document presentation across various platforms, there are certain limitations that have been imposed via proprietary formats.

The XFA dilemma: A proprietary roadblock in the PDF world

One example of this is Adobe’s XML Forms Architecture (XFA), which is a proprietary format that is intended to extend the functionality of traditional PDFs by making them dynamic and interactive. Yes, it is true that XFA can overcome some of the limitations of standard PDFs by allowing forms to adapt based on user input, but it is important to know that this format only works within Adobe’s own ecosystem. That means that since many Adobe products that support XFA are not available on mobile or web platforms, these “dynamic” PDFs often fail to function across many of today’s work environments.

For users and developers, that’s a big problem, because instead of facilitating seamless workflows, XFA documents can become the cause of bottlenecks. This limited compatibility and forced reliance on a specific vendor’s products is not only frustrating, it can be rather costly.

Overcoming XFA limitations for truly cross-platform PDF workflows

The good news is that because these challenges are becoming rather well-known, some solutions have emerged to help mitigate the problems caused by XFA’s proprietary nature. Now, it’s possible to enjoy PDF form functionality across heterogeneous platforms—across desktop, server, mobile, and web—all without being locked into any one vendor’s ecosystem. With support for viewing, filling, and signing XFA forms on virtually every type of platform, such solutions can relieve the pain points caused by the limited functionality of restrictive XFA solutions.

What’s more, there are solutions today that support automatic population and extraction of data from XFA forms, which can significantly enhance workflow automation. This is important because in many industry-specific applications, there is a need to populate forms with data that lives in other systems. However, the high cost and inflexible nature of prevailing XFA technology licensing make it impractical to use their tools for this purpose. As a result, most PDF vendors have simply chosen not to support XFA at all, leaving a gap in the market.

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