VA 760 form omits barcode font
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#80 VA 760 form omits barcode font
The VA 760 form, when output by OTS OpenTaxSolver2019_17.07_linux64 is lacking the barcode font that generates the VA barcode at the top of the genuine form from VA.
See the attached png. The upper half is the pdf output by OTS, note the VA76119888 mashup in the top right.
The lower half is the real form downloaded from the VA tax website, note that where the font mashup is on the OTS output there is what appears to be a CODE128 barcode instead.
It appears that somewhere in the conversion of the official VA form for OTS that an embedded barcode font was lost.
Hi Rich,
I have been playing with alternative methods to fill pdf forms. In particular I have been working on support for the F1116 foreign tax credit. As part of this work I wrote a new program poppler_form which can fill fillable pdf files using the standard goverment issue pdf. The VA-760 is a fillable form so poppler_form might work for you.
You can find my poppler_form work by looking for the new feature ticket I posted for F1116.
I'm working on a python script to convert the meta.dat that the universal pdf modifier uses to a fields list which poppler_form uses. I'm attaching the VA-760.fields file and the script to this ticket.
The scripts trys to match the position from the meta.dat file to the rectangle associated with the fillable field which poppler_form finds in the pdf file. It matched all but L4 and L17 on the VA-760 so I edited them by hand and may have picked the wrong field.
I have been using poppler_form with the f1116 but I have not made it Open Tax Solver compatible. Magic needs to happen to take the out.txt from the OTS solve step and merge it with the attached fields file. I think I used a linux join command to do this.
Last edit: Jim Houston 2020-04-29
I had assumed that this was a problem with the pdf.dat file. But I looked at the pdf.dat file and it has the barcode. Has this already been fixed?
If not it may be a problem with the meta.dat file writing putting a field over the barcode.
Is the string VA076019888 in the out.txt from the solve step?
I should also have mentioned that I could generate a new pdf.dat file. I was doing that when I thought about checking what the existing file produced.
Noting that this Virginia State form PDF bar-code issue was fixed in the recently released version 17.08.
Thank you,
-- Aston