TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.
This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.
So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.
Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.
So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.
I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.
I'll repeat it as much as I can but we need yo open up new journals for these kind of things.
All we need is a good cloud for storage, and volunteers. I think comp-sci people do that with https://arxiv.org/
The journal should accept any user submitted papers but have ranking based on other people, like successful reproducible studies (which is also accepted in journal) will be linked to the original journal. Reviews and such can be their own articles but also linked to the journal.
That way, undergrads can do projects reproducing previous studies (given resources) which will still give them research credit. Failures and exploration will also give people credit as it helps other people's research. We can just tag papers for novel ideas,failures, reproducing old paper,reviews, etc.
I think it has a chance to be very useful if we can pull it off. Although it'll have the same problems as of social media with upvote system. So some more thoughts needs to be there for the actual implementation.