Why is document viewer not capable of filling out and printing IRS website forms such as 1040 ?

[wpshooter]

Am using Hardy 8.04.2.

Why is it that if I go to the IRS website and pull up a form 1040, that I can not properly fill out that form and print it with the document viewer that is built into Hardy ?

I know that Adobe Acrobat reader has this capability on a M/S windows machine. Does the document viewer that is being used by Ubuntu NOT sufficient in capability to satisfy the requirements of the IRS website forms, i.e. is Adobe Acrobat a MUST for this job ? If Ubuntu document viewer is not capable of performing these functions, then this really needs to be addressed.

Thanks.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?
 * Could you add an example to the bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[wpshooter (joverstreet1)]

Yes, this is reproducible. I have had it happen on multiple computers using different versions of Ubuntu.

Go to the following IRS website and do a search/find for a IRS form 1040 (or any other IRS form as far as that is concerned) and then tried to fill out the name, address, social security information, etc., etc. and you will see that after you have typed your name in the name field and then when you go to the next field (and you should be able to go to the next field by using the TAB key - but you can't, you have to use the mouse to click on the next field to the filled out, that's problem # 1), the information that you just typed in the name field just disappears, that's problem# 2.

And NO, I can not send you an example of this problem because of what I just mentioned above, when you attempt to fill in the fields on the form and go to the next field the the previous field information is lost. I suppose that I could attempt to save a blank IRS 1040 form (with perhaps 1 field filled in, at best), but I really can not see any real benefit in doing that. The best way for you to see what the PROBLEMS with this document viewer (Evince) is to go to the IRS website for yourself and attempt to fill out on of the forms and it will be very obvious to you what the problems are. As a test of how this should work, get on a M/S windows machine that has the Adobe Acrobat reader document viewer program installed on it and then go to the IRS website and attempt to fill out the form 1040 and you will see how it is SUPPOSED to work.

http://www.irs.gov/app/picklist/list/formsInstructions.html?value=1040&criteria=formNumber&submitSearch=Find

Thanks.

[wpshooter (joverstreet1)]

P. S. - This has problem has developed (it has become broken, since last year (tax season)). Because last year I could fill out the 1040 form on the IRS website just fine. But last year the Evince program would not work properly with the Virginia Department of Taxation website forms, in that, when you attempted to print any of the blank forms from that website, you would wind up getting missing characters over various parts of the forms on the printed results. This happened either if the VDOT form was printed to a physical printer or to a file - this was NOT a driver problem because persons with various printers were all having this same problem.

Thanks.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

attaching the related pdf

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

i can confirm this issue, marking as such, and raising importance to medium

[Adam Buchbinder (adam-buchbinder)]

Other forms are not affected, e.g., Form W-4. The problem is that Form 1040 uses a nonstandard font in its form fields. I'm running a bleeding-edge development version (evince 2.25.91 with poppler 0.10), and the problem is still present.

You can see the problem if you look at the command-line output; it should say "Error: Unknown font in field's DA string"; this is because the field is using a nonstandard font name.

In any case, this is already being worked on upstream by the poppler developers; I'm marking it as a duplicate. I'll ping Dimitrios to raise the severity of that bug from low to medium.