That’s not entirely true. Some government forms where I live are shared in a PDF format but are only downloaded and displayed properly when they are opened in Acrobat, and otherwise display a page telling you to download acrobat. I suspect this allows the form to be updated, and see why it might be done, but I still find it very annoying.

I've never seen this before, and I've been using the Preview method described above for 15+ years. I have also never installed an Adobe product on a mac, ever. Do you have a link to a file that can produce this error in Mac Preview? It would be fun to learn how to bypass that.

Here's an example of a file that won't load properly in Preview and requires Acrobat: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/englis...

You can use Firefox to fill that in.

It does get by the "Please wait..." that you get in Preview or Chrome but Firefox 93.0 doesn't actually load the form properly (e.g. it's 6 pages in Acrobat but only 3 pages in Firefox and those 3 pages aren't even rendered properly).

Which version? For me 90.0 shows the "Please wait" message which some JavaScript or something is supposed to replace, and 93.0 force downloads it, even when I try to open it from a local file.

As of Firefox 93.0

From the release notes: "Firefox PDF viewer now supports filling more forms (XFA-based forms, used by multiple governments and banks)."

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-...

Thanks!

All / most PDF forms used by the Australian Defence Force are like this - I suspect it’s because it’s all tied into the identity / ability to digitally sign the forms.

It’s very frustrating when you send someone (externally) a PDF and it required them to install Acrobat.

Or maybe it’s just Adobe trying to take the P out of PDF…

The PDF format supports all sorts of insane extensions only implemented in Acrobat and only used by governments and large enterprises.

When I get forms like this I just dump them to jpg, fill them in an a paint program and zip them back up and send them as static images.

That doesn't work. You can't even view the PDF without Acrobat. (There's an example linked elsewhere in this thread.)

They may not be accepted by the form issuer if they have a process to pull the text out of specific fields in the PDF. I have run into that before. They are not just looking at the document but processing it.

You might try filing you FBAR, which if you get wrong results in criminal penalties, and which (practically) every American living overseas needs to complete each year:

https://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov/NoRegFBARFiler.html

then press the 'prepare' button to trigger the download servelet to get the PDF.

Preview cannot even open the file, let alone allow you to digitally sign it in the manner approved by the Treas Dept.

My employer uses a training and document system (third party) that requires the use of Acrobat to view PDFs. I never have to fill out forms within the PDFs; I simply can't open the files via Preview (or Firefox). Apparently the provider inserts JavaScript into the published documents (which, I assume, track document usage, since it is a training system).

Also, I can't post a link to the document, since it contains proprietary training materials.

Yes, I've had to fill out similar forms for submitting a manuscript to Nature Publishing Group journals. It seemed to me like the entire PDF was being dynamically generated via JS code or something. E.g. I would check a box for human subjects research and it would just add the relevant section to the form, re-adjusting the pagination on the fly.

Yes, the US polar programs physical qualification forms are like this, making me either use a VM or use my wife's laptop (since no supported acrobat for Linux).

Some of the, especially government, form utilize what I think is some kind of Acrobat Forms QR code generation to create a machine-readable representation of the form. This isn't supported in Preview.

Further, PDF is a monstrous format which includes its own variant of ECMA script built in. I think its pretty unrealistic to expect Apple to cleanroom the whole "standard" so I'm not too upset. They've got probably 90% of the way there, but it's unfortunately not every form.

For Canadians, PPT-054 is a good example [1] - notice $Form$054 and so on in the upper right corner. I can't remember which off hand but either the US I-131 or I-765 has one, too. Unfortunately I-131 isn't even loading in Safari for me at the moment.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/englis...

Unfortunately, this is incorrect.

I have seen weird pdfs that only display “help” messages when opened in preview… you have to follow a link and then open it in actual acrobat.

Yep, this has been my experience too. I remember having such a hard time trying to fill out a form I-9 for starting a new job last year that I had to not only download Acrobat, but for reasons I no longer recall I had to BUY A NEW PRINTER and PRINT the damn thing on paper to fill it out by hand! Absolutely batshit crazy nonsense!

People need to be very careful with this, because not only are there some PDF formats that only work with Acrobat, but I've encountered issues where the PDF opens correctly in Preview, and you can fill them just fine, but if you save it and send it, and the person opens your filled PDF in Acrobat, the text you entered will be completely jumbled.

If a PDF is meant to be printed, who cares, but if you're sending it to someone, make sure to open it in Acrobat and check if it's formatted correctly; ideally, make it in Acrobat.

I've seen government forms that run some JavaScript or something to hide the actual contents of the form unless you open it in Acrobat reader.

For Wimdows/Linux users LibreOffice Draw also mostly works for this. Its clunkey, and there are exceptions, but generally you can drop a textbox wherever you need, then re-export as a pdf when you're done.

You can do this with Inkscape also.

Xournal is great for this

Sadly, I had to install Adobe Acrobat reader last week to print a tiled PDF. The PDF itself was poster sized, but I needed to print it out on a normal 8.5x11” printer. Preview didn’t support doing that, but Reader did.

This works to make a form that looks okay on your screen or when printed. It will not make a form that works correctly if the recipient wants to process it using proprietary Acrobat features.