As with the rest of the Internet browsers, Google continues to improve the functions and capabilities of the PDF reader in Chrome . And it is that this type of programs in particular are becoming for many users the default PDF reader.
That is why little by little they are introducing new functionalities that allow more work to be carried out with these specific files. We are going to talk about all of them in these lines, about a new functionality that the search giant has just added to its browser. Specifically, we mean that the company has added support for XFA-based PDF forms .
This is a novelty that can be very interesting for those who normally handle forms in these Adobe files.
What are XFA-based PDF forms
First of all, we must be clear that XFA is the acronym for XML Forms Architecture . Therefore, we can say that these XFA forms are embedded within the PDF documents, so the user can fill them in and print them. In this way we have the possibility to write data in the XFA form, but you cannot save it. Hence, on certain occasions, we are interested in printing these data filled out on paper.
However, what we must bear in mind is that a PDF file viewer will not be able to display this information if it does not support XFA forms. That is precisely what happens so far with the Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers , which do not display these types of PDF forms. But of course, at the same time it is clear that Adobe Acrobat DC does support these PDFs. That is why, to date, users who wanted to open a file with this type of form had to use the Adobe program.
Hence precisely the importance of the new Chrome function that we are commenting on here, and it is already compatible to see the data of the XFA forms in the PDFs.
How to activate the XFA function in Chrome
There are several built-in functions that the Chrome PDF file viewer makes available to us right now. For example, over time the user interface, the toolbar, the table of contents, or the page thumbnails in the sidebar have been improved. Likewise, Google has worked so that we can see the properties of the document, have support for annotations , or the two-page view.
So now Chrome’s PDF viewer also has support for XFA forms. It is for all this reason that below we will show you how to open and view XFA forms in PDFs directly in the Google browser. The first thing we do is start the Chrome browser normally. Next, in the address bar we write chrome: // flags, where we look for the entry called PDF XFA Support.
From here, the only thing left to do is activate the functionality and restart the browser for the changes to be effective. Now we will be able to Open any PDF that has an embedded XFA form and we will already have the possibility to view this data directly from the browser .
