[Discuss] Tax software

[Patrick]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 10:07:56 -0800
Gary Gauthier wrote:

> Intuit products blow.

Aaah...  Thanks, this explains something else.

My boss emails as many pay-stubs as he can, including mine,
instead of snail-mailing them [which I support in principle;
kills fewer trees that way], but the first couple of PDFs were
unreadable under Xubuntu.  Strangely enough, the same viewers and
converters worked under Asus/Xandros Linux on my EEE, with some
warnings but no fatal errors.

The first PDFs used non-standard, non-embedded fonts which could
not be rendered in Xubuntu.  More recent PDFs are bigger [70k as
apposed to 10k], but readable.  They use the same fonts, embedded.

Yes it's Intuit output, and I appreciate him working with me on
this.

Some terminal output;

[old PDF, with fatal errors]
moi at nix:~/dl/paystub$ pdf2ps paystub.pdf paystub.ps 
   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused
   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.
   **** Warning: stream operator not terminated by valid EOL.
   **** Warning: stream Length incorrect.
   **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
                 But TimesNewRoman is not embedded.
   **** Unknown operator: '-'
   **** Unknown operator: 'l52C'
   **** Unknown operator: 'V9Z4'
ERROR: /syntaxerror in --token--
Operand stack:
   --dict:6/6(L)--   2   --dict:82/82(ro)(G)--   --nostringval--
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   1   1   --nostringval--   %for_pos_int_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %array_continue   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   %loop_continue   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1120/1686(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:85/200(L)--   --dict:85/200(L)--   --dict:104/127(ro)(G)--   --dict:241/347(ro)(G)--   --dict:22/24(L)--   --dict:4/6(L)--   --dict:24/31(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
ESP Ghostscript 815.02: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1



[new PDF, with warnings]
moi at nix:~/dl/paystub$ pdf2ps paystub2.pdf paystub.ps 
   **** Warning: Embedded symbolic TT fonts must contain a cmap for Platform=1 Encoding=0.
   **** Warning: Encoding derived from 'post' is incomplete.
   **** Warning: Embedded symbolic TT fonts must contain a cmap for Platform=1 Encoding=0.
   **** Warning: Encoding derived from 'post' is incomplete.
   **** Warning: Embedded symbolic TT fonts must contain a cmap for Platform=1 Encoding=0.
   **** Warning: Encoding derived from 'post' is incomplete.

   **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
   **** The file was produced by: 
   **** >>>> Amyuni PDF Converter version 2.51 <<<<
   **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
   **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
   **** specification.

> Especially when you consider their devs are still idiotic
> enough to make software which requires admin privs to run.

Under Linux, Windows, or both?

> To me that's either outright stupidity or laziness.

Probably.

> I made a decision to never use their products again.
> So will probably try Cutetax also this year.
> 
> Ttyl, Gary

'Til then...

Cheers,

Patrick.

-- 
Eschew obfuscation.