You may have noticed some errors when trying to use an XFA document in your PDF software. This is pretty common, and it can cause trouble for your document workflow, but there is an easy solution: convert your XFA form to PDF. There are a few different ways to achieve this, depending on your requirements.

What Does XFA Mean?

XFA stands for XML Forms Architecture. It’s a set of proprietary XML specifications built originally for use with web forms in 1999, and has since become available for PDF.

What is XFA Flattening?

XFA flattening is another way of referring to converting XFA forms to standard PDF. Converting XFA forms to a PDF “flattens” the document data into one layer, making these PDF files usable with any standard PDF software.

Need to flatten XFA? Check out "How to Flatten XFA PDFs"

Why Convert XFA to a Flat PDF?

Most XFA documents are complete nonsense to most PDF software out there, and usually are a cause for errors. Flattening XFA forms can keep your existing forms processing workflow from exploding, and saves your developers time and headaches.

How to Convert XFA to Standard PDF

You can use the PDF Forms Flattener Command Line Application to easily turn your XFA documents into PDFs. If you download PDF Forms Flattener (either as a free trial or available to buy) you’ll be able to import XFA form data into blank PDF documents before you flatten.

What About Dynamic XFA?

Interactive forms that are able to change form fields based on user input are known as dynamic forms as opposed to static forms. Some tools have trouble converting dynamic XFA to PDF, but PDF Forms Flattener is able to flatten dynamic XFA with no issues.

That’s it!

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how to XFA form flatten, why it can be a good idea to convert XFA PDF to standard PDF, and what it means to flatten XFA PDFs.

Try out PDF Forms Flattener today, or if you’re in the market for a more enterprise-level solution, try out PDF Forms Extension for the Adobe PDF Library SDK.

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