There is quite a bunch of "PDF" features around forms which basically only work with Adobe PDF and maybe one or two other ones. But good luck if non of them are available for you.
Worse many "office" people which create PDF's with form fields use Adobe tools, so they never see that what they hand out to thousends of students isn't working with >90% of PDF viewers....
Installed Acrobat a few weeks ago for this use case specifically. I feel like Preview used to be a lot better at editing fields, recently it has been a real pain.
PDF has two types of forms: native and JS driven. I'd bet that the problems are with the JS. I'd also be willing to bet that Adobe makes Acrobat author forms in a way that intentionally breaks third party readers.
Apple's Preview does a pretty good job with generic pdf forms. Unfortunately, Adobe has created multiple types of pdf forms using different technologies and very complex specs.
Apple does not support all of these. (You can also find many cases of PDF forms using Adobe tools that do not round trip between platforms).
OTOH, Preview renders PDFs way better than Adobe Reader does. Tweaking the settings in AR didn't help either.
I only wish Preview would do two things:
- open files in "maximized" view.
- when opening a file, Left/Right arrow keys don't let you navigate the pages. Instead, they move the current page a few pixels left/right! (they work like horizontal scrollers)
They are actually quite handy when the only allowed method of submission is via snail mail or fax. Much better than the alternative of printing an empty form and filling it all in by hand.
The problem is that if the PDF forms where create with an Adobe program even things which should work with generic PDF might not do so because the Adobe program used JS or whatever below the cover.
EDIT: I looked into some of the PDFs again and it seems I had been wrong. Not sure what they use but it doesn't seem to be js.
EDIT EDIT: But I found other forms which where affected see my response below.
I've encountered JavaScript-heavy PDF's before, but which were obviously so. (Automatically calculating values for one form field based on another, generating QR codes, etc.)
I've never come across a seemingly "normal" form PDF but which secretly used JavaScript for normal things like form filling, so that normal form-filling tools didn't work. I don't understand why the normal PDF type-in-a-text-box tool wouldn't work.
Have you actually come across this? Can you point to any examples?
The Canadian govt forms like Visa application forms or Tax forms don't work on any Linux pdf tool that I tested with. The pdf would display empty with a JS error message. This was a few years ago though.
Had to install the linux version of Adobe, which is many years out of date now.
