A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.

Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)

Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea.

The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...

It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.