The United States Internal Revenue Service(IRS) has been distributing their tax forms and publications in electronic form for years. They were iamong the very early adopters of the PDF technology. They initially distributed their products via BBS and CD-ROM.
There have been issues with the creation/compilation of the products placed on the CD-ROM, which escalated with the tax year 2003 edition. They included a manually intensive preparation cycle; incorrect (or missing) links to products; difficulty for the user finding the correct products, and early cutoff times. When the production process was reviewed at the end of the production cycle, a better solution was needed. The IRS performed an extensive search for solutions to help speed up the preparation process, and the PDFfolio solution was selected.
The 2003 Version of the CD-ROM
The data preparation for the 2003 version (and prior years) was done using numerous Word and Excel documents, consisting of up to 70 pages worth of redundant information. Keeping these documents up-to-date was tedious and error-prone. The process also required cutoff dates to be set earlier than would normally be desired (mid-November and mid-January), with more than a month needed for pre-mastering. Most of the work on the existing documents had to be done manually. One outcome of this was products being included on the CD that had previously been retired or obsoleted.
Despite the several documents listing of the tax products, customers found it rather difficult to find the product they were looking for. There were no detailed descriptions of the products available and no links to associated products. In addition, the file naming convention and document structure was rather complex and sometimes inconsistent.
“I put my neck on the line by switching to this technology, and it’s never let me down.”
- Paul Showalter, Senior Analyst, Internal Revenue Service
Requests for an improved version
From the user’s point of view, a more easily navigable system was required. The ability to perform a fast and efficient search was demanded as well. The user interface needed a redesign. In addition, the design of the overview pages had to be improved.
Of primary importance for the development part of the CD was the necessity to shorten the production time, allowing later cutoff dates. A change of one single product must not induce the complete recreation of the overview documents. The information about the documents on the CD had to be consolidated into one place (a database).
Implementation for the 2004 issue
The design issues were addressed by hiring a professional designer. An extensive evaluation demonstrated that PDFfolio was the only application that met the other requirements.
In order to make the transition to a PDFfolio-based application, the database was temporarily suspended, verified and cleansed in the original Excel tables. That data was imported into a FileMaker Pro database whose primary use is to create a data format suitable for the new navigation system.
Concurrently, a new navigation system was developed as a PDF document. This document uses the concept of virtual pages. With virtual pages, information is displayed in page-size “chunks”, and navigation elements (push buttons) are used to display another “chunk” of information. Physically, the PDF document always displays the same page. In order to implement virtual pages, the data has to be embedded into the document, and must reside in the application’s memory. Using the database to create the appropriate program code ensures a correct transfer of information from the database to the document and it guarantees data integrity.
On the second page, a more detailed view of the product information is displayed. The second page also uses the concept of virtual pages, but here, the information is in addition dynamically displayed depending on the contents to be presented. This is accomplished by using the “liquid fields” concept, which changes the size and position of each field, depending on the data that is present for each product.
All of the data is contained within the application’s memory, which enables the creation of a search subsystem in a rather straightforward manner. A simple string search was implemented for product numbers, product names, and a combination of product name and descriptions. These search functions create a short search list, similar to the complete product list, from where the detailed information can be accessed.
The 2004 issue
Using the tools provided with PDFfolio, the production time could be reduced from 6 to 10 weeks to approximately one week. This allowed the cutoff dates to be extended by almost one month. Last second changes required only minor modifications to the products database entry, and the recreation of the database output … a matter of minutes.
The navigation system worked extremely well, and the search was (because all the information is in the application’s memory) extremely fast; the search list is displayed almost instantaneously. Feedback from users (and the help desk support staff) was very positive.
The capabilities for producing the CD were more than fulfilled, and the 2004 issue of the Tax Product CD-ROM was an unprecedented success. For the first time in many years, the CD was released on schedule. “I put my neck on the line by switching to this technology, and it never let me down”, says Paul Showalter, Producer of the CD-ROM, and he continues “one of the most amazing things is the size of the navigation system file, which is only a little bit more than 400 Kbytes, and contains all the information for more than 1150 products, and the links to more than 2,500 files.”
“We are extremely proud of the decision to migrate to PDFfolio, and we’ve delivered exciting new projects thanks to this toolkit.”
- Paul Showalter
The 2005 issue
The producers of the Tax Products CD-ROM try hard to listen to their customers, and there were additional suggestions concerning the user interface that was tried to address. Users wanted to be able to easily scan the entire list of products, so we developed a scrollable list of the tax products on the CD. This was implemented without any changes in the original data structure, by simply replacing the display function and modifying the search functions. The 2005 issue has 1260 products, and about half of the products changed since the 2004 issue was released.
In addition to the user interface change, the search functionality was fine-tuned, in order to become more user-friendly. Again, they listened to their users and improved the product.
Once again, the shortened production time is considered to be a great advantage of this system, and the chance for errors has been reduced to virtually zero. In the past, you could always count on links not working, and files not being where they should be, but that has been virtually eliminated, in large part due to the redesign of the interface, and the use of the PDFfolio set of tools.