1XFA Forms have their roots in a former e-forms company called JetForm
2later renamed Accelio and acquired by Adobe in 2002. XFA concepts were
3first introduced in PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6) and expanded in PDF 1.6,
4(Acrobat 7). Unlike Adobe’s earlier forms technology XFA Forms utilize
5XML throughout. While this can be viewed as a technically superior
6approach as it leverages XML as the backbone for all types of
7structured documents, there are distinct drawbacks to be considered:
8
9- Adobe XFA Forms are not compatible with AcroForms, and they cannot
10be modified in Acrobat.
11
12- Creating XFA form requires Adobe LiveCycle Forms Designer which
13ships with Acrobat 7; and, on the backend there are no commercial or
14open-source alternatives to the proprietary Adobe Forms Server for
15processing XFA Forms.
16
17- Existing Acrobat AcroForms cannot be automatically converted to XFA
18Forms. Typographic fidelity may need to be sacrificed when manually
19redrawing the forms with LiveCycle Designer.
20
21- Adobe XFA Form documents are not compatible with versions of Acrobat
22or Reader prior to 6.0. There are no reliable statistics on the
23versions of Acrobat and Reader currently in use in the world.
24Anecdotal evidence based on sales and customer support calls indicates
25plenty of end users are still running version 5 or 4.
26
27- AcroForms JavaScript is not supported with XFA Forms. A different,
28incompatible JavaScript syntax is used which leads to increased
29programming costs.
30
31- XFA Forms are not part of the PDF/A (Archiving) standard which is
32based on PDF Version 1.4. Applications for government or other
33institutions that must comply with digital archive standards may be
34problematic.
35
36- There are no commercial or open-source alternatives to using Adobe
37products for XFA Forms as there are with AcroForms. If you run into
38problems with XFA Forms you will have no one else to call besides
39Adobe.