TaxAct

What works

Installation, Federal Q&A, State Q&A, printing finished tax forms, PDF output of finished tax forms.

What does not

Federal and state filing instructions print in a font so small it requires a jeweler's loupe to read.

Workarounds

What was not tested

E-filing, video clips, help, automatic program updates.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

This is TaxAct Deluxe (paid) version. The free-as-in-beer crippleware downloaded version should work similarly. This program currently requires a very specific combination of Wine versions and IE version to operate correctly. Wine versions 1.5.0 - 1.5.19 work. Wine versions 1.5.20-23 would rate Bronze; they cause text in the on-screen tax forms (including the W2 you fill out) to be illegible, with the letters piled up on one another. This is not fixed by adding basic fonts or importing Windows fonts. I have not yet tested Wine versions beyond 1.5.23. Internet Explorer 6 must be installed with Winetricks. You will have to download it manually, following Winetricks prompts. You don't need Gecko (and it doesn't help). This test was run without Gecko. IE8 will work, but a dialog complaining of script errors pops up (twice) every time you click a button for another Q&A question. The dialogs can be dismissed, but it's a nuisance. The same problem seems to happen with IE7, but the dialog boxes that pop up are blank and can't be dismissed. Installing Windows Truetype fonts in your Linux distro improves the quality of the text. I used fonts from Windows 98. When you print to PDF, the forms are generated correctly, but TaxAct complains that it can't find a PDF viewer to show them. You can fix this by either modifying the registry to open PDFs in your distro's PDF viewer, or installing a PDF viewer under Wine.