README

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.