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.