At least four US states have “enhanced” PDF fillable tax forms. The options for processing these forms are limited. But Alabama permits the use of browsers, as well as Acrobat Reader, for its enhanced forms
(with Calculations). The browser option also makes Alabama’s forms available to Linux users. TPFC has Windows portable versions of Google Chrome, X-Chromium, and Firefox, which are compatible with the Alabama forms.
Alabama, New York, and Missouri have tax forms in PDF format that have “been enhanced to complete all calculations and compute the amount of tax due.” Also, those forms and Hawaii’s have been enhanced to print a two dimensional (2D) barcode, which contains data entered on the form. There is a considerable amount of Javascript embedded in the PDFs to implement these enhancements. The PDFs of the first three states can be considered to be low-end tax programs.
A user cannot use the New York or Hawaii enhanced forms in Chrome, FF, or Foxit. For example, after downloading a
NY or
HI form, click Open File... (Ctrl+O) in Chrome and open the form. You will see a yellow “lid” that says “WARNING: PLEASE USE A DIFFERENT PDF VIEWER,” and advises you to use the desktop version of Adobe Reader. The lid also says that the form is incompatible with Linux, probably because Adobe’s last Linux version of Reader is
out-of-date. The forms use Javascript to decide whether to display the lid or the form, depending on what form viewer is being used.
I think the form viewer check is excessive. The barcode enhancement for the four states is implemented with Javascript software called Ultraforms, which is embedded in the PDFs. Foxit owns
Ultraforms. It is compatible with their own PDF processors, as well as those from Adobe and other sources. As the Alabama forms show, it is compatible with browser PDF processors.
The other enhancement is the calculations. There is a fair amount of code for it, but it does not use recent Adobe JavaScript features. The tax forms from Hawaii do not even perform calculations, yet they have the form viewer check.
The forms disallow the use of Adobe Acrobat 9 and earlier. This type of version check could be extended to other form viewer software. (Test
formsVersion or
viewerVersion.)
There is no Windows portable version of Adobe Reader. I think that PortableApps.com cannot proceed to create a version without Adobe’s agreement. Perhaps Mr. Toth can create a
yaP version?
