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

[Todd]

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





--- Comment #19 from Todd <toddrme2178 gmail com>  2011-03-23 02:00:21 ---
Once again, how the program was designed and how users expect it to behave are
two entirely differently things.  The whole point of the principle of least
surprise is that what matters is how users interpret the program, not how it
was designed.  

The real question is "are users likely to read the documentation before using
the annotation feature".  If not, then the discussion in the documentation is
not sufficient.

When users open a pdf document in okular, they are using it as a pdf reader. 
Yes, okular can read other documents.  But for the most part the interaction
with those documents is consistent with how you interact with them in more
specialized readers.  For the most part standard pdf features behave like
standard pdf features.  But you have one feature that is labeled the same as a
standard pdf feature, looks the same as a standard pdf feature, but behaves
radically different.

If okular overall did its own thing and didn't behave at all like standard pdf
readers, then people would expect this one feature to also behave differently. 
But when pretty much everything behaves like a standard pdf reader, users
wouldn't expect one random feature to behave radically differently.  

So yes, from a developer standpoint okular is not just a plain pdf reader.  But
when a user is looking for a way to annotate their pdfs in linux, they open it
in okular, and they see an "annotate" feature, I think that is not likely to be
at the front of their mind.  I think they are likely to assume that it behaves
in a pretty standard manner, just like pretty much everything else they have
seen up to that point.  Certainly everyone besides you who has commented here
saw it that way.

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