4 Things to Look for in a PDF Forms Management SDK

Do you ever find yourself struggling with any of these common PDF forms challenges?

• Trouble opening, editing, accessing, or printing PDF form documents.
• Struggling to import and export information from your PDF form.
• PDF viewer software causing PDF form incompatibility issues & loss of features.
• Inefficient paper-forms processing slowing down important workflows.

PDF forms are not always the easiest to work with, but fortunately, there is software to help. 

Here’s what to look for in an SDK to help conquer your PDF form development:

• Stability: Developers can rely on a solid application experience.
• Reduced memory usage: The ideal scenario for a server environment with a long running process.
• Flattened PDF: Output that’s more consistent with Adobe Acrobat.
• Form type: The ability to determine if your form is a dynamic or static XFA form.

1. Stability

Many end-users’ programs are short-lived programs, meaning you ‘call’ it or ‘invoke’ it once, it takes an action, it finishes, and the program exits and ceases to be ‘alive’. In custom applications that use 3rd party SDKs, however, the program may always be running or running for many hours at a time. Due to this, you may need to start to use your SDK, perform some actions with it, perform some more actions with it, then rest for X many minutes or hours, then perform more actions with it, etc. The point is you may need to use that SDK, on demand, say thousands or even millions of times while the application is running!

If there’s an instability in a short-lived application it can often go unnoticed, but for a long-lived program, instabilities will quickly cause problems, often leading to a catastrophic situation or a ‘crash’.  The more stable and dependable the SDK, the better it is to prevent such unfortunate scenarios.

2. Reduced Memory Usage

Many people like to talk about the advances in computer technology and will reference how inexpensive memory is now than it was 10 years ago. This is most certainly true, but memory isn’t infinite. Actually, as your application uses more and more memory, it’s a much more taxing expense on the operating system. E.g., if your application uses 400MB of memory that’s quite a bit different than if it uses 12GB of memory, which is 30 times more.

If the SDK reduces its memory footprint, it ensures a more stable, better-performing application experience.
 

Read: Cracking the Code: Managing PDF Forms 
 

3. Flattened PDF

Dynamic PDF XFA documents are masquerading as PDFs, but they’re not actually PDFs. That means they don’t contain meaningful PDF content; on the contrary, they contain a ‘shell’ of a PDF that’s merely a fallback for PDF viewers that aren’t XFA-aware to display. So instead of seeing the expected content, you see some placeholder image or text.

This means converting Dynamic XFA documents to a Flat PDF is a dizzyingly complex problem with many layers of complexity. In view of this, your PDF SDK should preserve the fidelity of your XFA documents. Fidelity in this case means you don’t lose anything visually when you compare the XFA input to the Flattened output.

4. Form Type

The ability of an SDK to determine if an XFA document is a Dynamic or Static XFA PDF can be super important. Not only can you acknowledge if XFA content is static or dynamic, but you can also drive automation based on that confirmation.

Additionally, the ability to Flatten an XFA document as if it were printed is a powerful feature, but why would you need a different way to Flatten an XFA document?  

The answer: an XFA Forms document can appear differently when printed than when viewed. This is because some fields can be designated as only being visible when they are printed. Similarly, fields can be designated as never being visible when printed. Because of this, you can see why being able to Flatten as if you were printing the document is an important scenario to support. Be sure to look for these features in a PDF forms management tool.

Need to manage forms with an SDK? Forms Extension is for you.  
 

Prefer a command-line tool? Try Forms Flattener.