The German Internal Revenue Service (LfSt), one of the highest tax authorities of the german state, develops a software called ELSTER, which is distributed free of charge throughout Germany to create electronic tax returns via internet. Since 1997 VPE is integrated into ELSTER to print the tax relevant data. IDEAL Software and the LfSt now signed a wide-ranging cooperation agreement to port VPE to the following platforms:
* All important Linux distributions (Suse, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu)
* Mac OS X PowerPC
* Mac OS X Intel
* Sun Solaris 10 Sparc 64-bit
The release of VPE for all above platforms is scheduled for Q2 2007.
IDEAL Software also plans to release versions for Sun Solaris 10 Intel as well as IBM AIX, IBM z-Series and HP-UX.
Whilst providing the same API across all platforms, so that PDF and native document files can be generated in the usual way, VPE will provide the preview capability for the Windows platform only. On the other platforms the preview and printing of PDF files will be delegated to platform specific tools, like Acrobat Reader or Xpdf.