[okular] [Bug 394775] Annotations in the separated XML files

[Sebastian Guttenberg]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394775

Sebastian Guttenberg <wurschtl77 at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |wurschtl77 at gmail.com

--- Comment #4 from Sebastian Guttenberg <wurschtl77 at gmail.com> ---
In the duplicate #396681 , there are reasons provided, why this feature
disappeared, but I don't find them all convincing. 

One reason is of course understandable (not wanting to maintain two user
interfaces an the fact that storage inside the pdf was one of the most
frequently requested features). However, what I don't agree at all, is that the
old way is bad because it "didn't do what the user expected and was full of
bugs". This shortcoming of the old feature was only because of poor
documentation and not because of the method itself. One really had to do
research to find out that the .xml was stored in 
.kde/share/apps/okular/docdata . If at the time of pressing "save" this had
been clearly announced, confusion would have been far less. Also it might have
been a good solution to also allow the .xml to lie in the same directory as the
pdf, so that it would have been easier to copy them together, if desired. 
One of the mentioned bugs in "full of bugs" was apparently the fact that  an
xml was not related to its pdf any longer after renaming the pdf. But this
wouldn't have been a bug, if user's simply had known about the mechanism
behind. And then it's clear: if you rename the pdf and want to keep the
annotations, you have to rename the .xml .  

In #397097 there are a few arguments in favour of the old way. For me, one of
the main arguments is disk-space. Assume you're working through a scanned book
of say 40MB. Then you make a few tiny annotations worth a kB, but if you don't
want to overwrite the original you get another 40MB. As a researcher you might
have tons of pdf's where you don't want to change the original, so you have to
double each article that you annotate. 

On top of that, if you work with a tool like jabref, and have the original
pdf's linked to the entry of your bibliography, then doing annotations and
saving it as a different pdf will force you to update your links in the
library, otherwise you won't see the annotations next time. 

Furthermore, the old way in principle would have allowed (though I think it
wasn't implemented) to switch on and off the annotations easily. If they are
embedded in the pdf this might be more complicated (or am I wrong there?).

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