CIB pdf toolbox technical guide (EN)

4. Possibilities of form use

4.1. PDF documents with XFA form data

PDF documents can also contain the form fields and their contents as XFA data. The processing of these data is possible from CIB pdf toolbox version 1.4.89 onwards.

The PDF specification 1.5 introduced support for interactive forms based on the XML architecture in PDF. XFA (XML Forms Architecture) contains the information about the form in a XML data stream. This is essentially about the form fields (calculations, validations, formatting) and the associated data. XFA was developed by the Canadian company JetForm. Adobe acquired JetForm and introduced XFA into its PDF specification and Acrobat versions 6 and 7 are based on it.

When processing XFA form fields, CIB pdf toolbox converts this information into a regular PDF form field. The XFA data will be deleted. Information that has no equivalent in PDF will be lost, e.g. numeric or date format.