[Okular-devel] Continue to Annotate PDF Files Between Different Operating Systems?

[Gregg Leichtman]

Is there an easy way to continue annotating a pdf file between Linux and Windows without losing previous annotations?

I am using Okular 0.14.0 on Windows XP SP3 via KDE for Windows 4.8.0 and Okular 0.13.2 on OpenSuse 12.1.

I see that I can create a document archive that can be transferred from one system to another, but when I try to annotate the loaded ocular archive (zip) file, it succeeds but does not save it (not really a surprise, since it is a zip file). I also see the XML files in the archive---metadata.xml and content.xml---where metadata.xml appears to be the very similar to the annotation files stored under Windows at:

A) C:\Documents and Settings\<yourLoggedInUserProfile>\Application Data\.kde\share\apps\okular\docdata\<someKeyUID>.<yourfile>.pdf.xml

and under Linux at

B) <yourHomeDirectory>/.kde4/share/apps/ocular/docdata/<someKeyUID>.<yourFile>.pdf.xml

with very small differences described below and the content.xml file just ties the pdf and metadata.xml files together in the archive.

Based on this it doesn't look like a raw document archive is the ticket. I imagine that I could continue to have the pdf file on both systems and then transfer the annotation files between A) and B) above if I understood the significance of the keyUID filename prefix (my guess is that it is just a UID (possibly a hash of the file path), so that the same pdf file in different locations of the same file system don't collide when they are both independently annotated), but is there an easier way?

The difference in the metadata.xml file in the archive appears to be almost identical to the files A) and B) except that the documentInfo URL attribute has been stripped along with a small number of other seemingly low importance variations. For example:

diff metadata.xml 13227877.some.pdf.xml 
3c3
< <documentInfo>
---
> <documentInfo url="/a/url/to/a/pdf/some.pdf">
1809a1810,1829
>  <generalInfo>
>   <history>
>    <oldPage viewport="146;C2:0.4995:0.975965:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="147;C2:0.4995:0.013834:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="146;C2:0.4995:0.975965:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="147;C2:0.4995:0.962451:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="148;C2:0.4995:0.965721:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="149;C2:0.4995:0.288142:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="130;C2:0.49949:0.849155:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="131;C2:0.49949:0.420097:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="142;C2:0.49949:0.98029:1"/>
>    <oldPage viewport="143;C2:0.49949:0.98749:1"/>
>    <current viewport="144;C2:0.49949:0.412309:1"/>
>   </history>
>   <views>
>    <view name="PageView">
>     <zoom mode="1" value="1.89755"/>
>    </view>
>   </views>
>  </generalInfo> 

Would it be as "simple" as creating an application import menu item that unpacks the archive, places the pdf at the location of the archive, adds the URL attribute to the documentInfo element and deals with the other small variations (in this case what appears to be storage of the navigation history and the current page view type and zoom factor) and then moves the metadata.xml file into the path for A) or B) along with a file rename?

                          -=> Gregg <=-

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