Q · What is this?

A reader for grant-application PDFs. Specifically: forms downloaded from Grants.Gov, which most PDF readers can't show. They open blank, or display a polite request to install Adobe Reader 8. This page reads them anyway.

Q · Why won't Preview, Chrome, Firefox open my form?

The form is XFA — XML Forms Architecture, an Adobe technology from 2003. Adobe killed XFA support in 2020 (security headaches), but the federal grant system still uses it. Acrobat reads XFA. Almost nothing else does.

Q · What does the Decoder show me?

The values from the form: budget tables, key personnel, organizations, dates. Plus it extracts the embedded PDF attachments — biosketches, budget justifications, current-and-pending-support documents — and previews each one inline. No Acrobat needed.

Q · Which forms are supported?

Specialized layouts for the SF-424 R&R family — R&R Budget (RR_Budget_3_0) and R&R Senior/Key Person Profile (RR_KeyPerson_3_0). Other XFA forms fall back to a generic field-tree view; values still appear, just less polished.

Q · Does my file leave the browser?

No. Everything happens in this tab. Open the Network panel in your dev tools and you'll see no requests going out. The whole tool is one HTML file; you can read the source.

Q · Why are there no rendered pages of the original PDF?

XFA forms have no rendered page baked in. Acrobat builds the layout at runtime from a schema, the way LaTeX builds a PDF from source. We skip the layout step and show you the data directly.

Single HTML file · client-side · TANSTAAFL · source on GitHub