OpenTaxFormFiller

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OpenTaxFormFiller is an open source utility aiming to eliminate the pain of using a PDF viewer to fill in tax forms. The target audience is anybody who prefers not to use a major software package to do their taxes. Users of OpenTaxSolver will be delighted to know that there is a utility to import their tax solve output.

Forms support: The major pain in supporting forms is in mapping Line Numbers to PDF input fields, but it seems to be getting easier each year. Please see YEAR/supported.json to see forms support for the given tax year. Feel free to fork and add your own state.

Dependencies:

Pdftk : industrial grade console utility for manipulating PDF files Node.js : scripting engine OpenTaxSolver : not strictly a dependency, but useful for calculations

Platform support: Linux: Working Windows: Should work if script files are ported to bat files.

General Instructions:

1. Compose your form inputs as a JSON file (see examples/8829.json). Must have .json as an extension
2. In the main directory, run ./script/fillin_values FORM_NAME INPUT.json OUTPUT_FILE where form name is something like f8829 or f1040.
3. Your OUTPUT_FILE should be your desired pdf filename.

If you use OpenTaxSolver:

1. Save your output to a file.
2. Run node ./script/json_ots.js FILENAME > OUTPUT_FILE.json
3. You will use the OUTPUT FILE for the General Instructions.

TODO (besides form support): -Better error checking in scripts -Better testing on OTS output. -Create bat ports of bash scripts

Notes: The numbers in the examples directory should be taken as bogus.

References: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ http://www.myown1.com/linux/pdf_formfill.shtml http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/

LICENSE: This code is released under the MIT license.