2010-04-11

Lessons learned from doing my own 2009 income taxes on Mac OS X

IRS PDF forms are "fillable" meaning you fill in values on screen and then save the form with the values you entered.

The IRS PDF forms do not format completely correctly if you use Mac OS X Preview (for example social security numbers are all bunched together instead of being spread out like the form intends), so the best bet is to just use Adobe Reader.

Once you open an IRS PDF form in Preview and then save it you can no longer open it in Adobe Reader in fillable format; it will tell you that you cannot save your changes.  So it is best to just use Adobe Reader from the outset on IRS PDF forms.

The Arizona PDF 140 form has its permissions set so that you cannot save the form with the values you entered.  However, if you open this form using the Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader you can save the form with your input.

Unfortunately, the Foxit Reader cannot print the saved form with the barcode on the front page which encodes all your input.

Fortunately, you can use Adobe Reader to open a form with saved values that you saved using Foxit Reader and then print it with the barcode on the front page.