[Okular-devel] [Bug 268575] Okular should display a warning about before annotating

[Todd]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268575





--- Comment #17 from Todd <toddrme2178 gmail com>  2011-03-23 00:58:10 ---
"and the documentation clearly states the behaviour."

The problem is that people are unlikely to read the documentation for what
seems to be totally standard PDF behavior.  Do you expect people to read the
documentation before using a tab bar on a web browser?  Before trying to print
something from a word processor?  These are standard behaviors, and users would
expect them to behave in a standard manner.

Annotations are a standard part of pdfs.  Users see the word "annotations" and
they assume that these are the standard annotations used by many other pdf
programs.  

Users simply aren't going to read the documentation before using what seems to
be a standard behavior.  And in this case they will likely waste hours of their
time because of it.

And it is not just that they are different, they serve radically different
fundamental purposes.  Annotations in other pdf programs are commonly used for
transferring notes on the document from one person to another in a consistent
and platform-independent manner.  That is not possible with your version of
annotations, which apparently are intended for making personal notes not
intended to be shared with anyone else.

The principle of least surprise comes into play here.  What would be more
surprising for a user: that their pdf program behaves in a manner similar to
many other pdf programs, or that it randomly uses the exact same name for
something not only totally different, but something that serves an entirely
different and totally incompatible purpose?  

I think that if a program is going to radically violate user expectations,
potentially losing them hours or even days of work in the process, it is not
unreasonable to warn them beforehand in a visible manner.  The documentation is
simply not visible in this scenario, because as I mentioned users don't
normally read the documentation for what they think is a standard behavior.

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