The first move is to try latest version available… So one goes to Adobe web page and looks for Adobe Reader. The most obvious thing to do is to follow a general advice often given by sites providing such PDF file: “use a free Adobe Reader software”. The problem is sometimes one has to open and fill a form provided as “interactive” PDF (“AcroForm”). And this perfectly explains why only a PDF reader from Adobe can handle them without problems. It looks that “AcroForm” thing is not a common standard, but something made exlusively by Adobe company.

This was really confusing for me, as many claim PDFs with a form to fill are certainly XFA so they should be handled by some Linux PDF readers like Evince or that LibreOffice Draw can open it as a vector graphic. What is important is that these “interactive” PDFs are not XFA PDFs.

You can read about “AcroForm” in Wikipedia or here. >/Metadata 33 0 R/Names 58 0 R/NeedsRendering true/Pages 47 0 R/Type/Catalog>

In such file the text “AcroForm” can be found somewhere inside when opening as a plain text: To be more specific, I’m referring to PDF files using “AcroForm” extention. As of 2021 the Acrobat Reader 9 (from 2013) is still the best way to open “interactive” PDF documents on Linux! By “interactive” I mean a PDF document with a form fields to fill and some extra logic triggered by filling these fields.

Acroread linux