[Okular-devel] Engaging

[Yuval Levy]

Dear Okular developers.

First of all let me say thank you!  In the past two years, since I went
back to university for law school, I have been reading and marking
thousands of PDF pages.  Despite also installing Adobe Reader and other
PDF tools available on Ubuntu, Okular has been absolutely vital to me,
and it is IMHO the best available tool.  It is so vital that it has
survived my migration from the KDE desktop to Unity (better support for
dynamic dual monitor configurations; plus an incredibly horrible
experience with KDE PIM) and it was the sole reason for me to upgrade
from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which I intended to use until the end of law
school because I have no time to deal with updates) to 12.10, when a
version of Okular became available that saves the comments and
highlightings into the PDF document.  I am currently using (and my
comments relate to) Okular Version 0.16.1.

The ability to save embedded annotations compatible with Adobe Reader is
extremely useful for me, thank you for implementing it.  It is useful
because I need to share the PDF documents that I highlight and mark with
other users and devices that do not use Okular.  Practically all of my
classmates and professors are on either Windows or OSX and they use
Adobe Reader.  I cannot change that.  The ability to save the marked up
document in a format that their software understand is citical to me,
because it enables me to collaborate with them while staying on Ubuntu
and using the software I love.

There are a couple of things that in my view could be improved.  I have
no intention to offend anybody, hence I did not post this to the bug
tracker because I want to avoid flaming developers like [1].

So here is the problem that I have with this otherwise amazing
functionality:  I open a newly downloaded PDF document, add my
highlights and remarks, and then I am confronted with two inconsistent
behaviours: if I use the "Save as" command from the File menu, the
comments are saved within the document.  If I use "Save copy as", they
are not.  The distinction between the two save functions is confusing
me.  On top of this, there is a third function, "Export as", with two
sub-option, "plain text" and "Document Archive".

Maybe somebody can explain to me the reason to have three different top
level menu entries for four variation on the same functionality.  I hope
you will not get offended by the following suggestion:

Replace all three menu entries with a single entry: "Save as...", based
on "Export as" -> "Document Archive" and let the user select in the
Filter field what of the four options he wants:
1. Copy of original PDF without annotations
2. PDF with embedded annotations
3. Annotations only (XML)
4. Document Archive (PDF+XML)
5. Text

Extra bonus: let the user configure a default saving option and add a
traditional "Save (CTRL-S)" entry to the menu.  Refrain from saving each
and every markup entry into $(kde4-config
--localprefix)/share/apps/okular/docdata/ (to prevent wear and tear of
user's SSD) and instead trigger regularly (e.g. every 5 minutes,
configurable like LibreOffice) an auto-save function, either to the XML
or to the PDF embed depending on the preference.

Another functionality that would be helpful to me and I have not found a
way to get around:  I now have hundreds of marked up PDFs.  The
annotations are all in $(kde4-config
--localprefix)/share/apps/okular/docdata/ and I would like to export all
of my library of marked up PDFs into PDFs with embedded annotations.
Any idea how I could do this?

One last thing that would speed up significantly my work with Okular:
Currently the review tools seems to be static (or I have not found how
to configure them).  I love the fact that I can quickly switch the
review tool used with a numeric key.  It would be nice if I could
customize the palette and for example replace the stamp symbol or the
polygon (which I never use) with different colour highlighters.  I
personally use four colours to identify four different types of texts
and right-clicking every time on each individual highlighted section to
change colour is time-consuming.  Of course, to think this idea through,
the icons would need to adapt their colour as well (and while we are at
the icons, it would be helpful to have the associated numeric key
displayed on the lower left corner, and if the palette could be moved
around and icon size could be changed -- all of which are minor
improvements comparing to the major one of being able to define the
presets).  Also, I don't know if it is a bug (and maybe an
Ubuntu-specific one), but the cursor remains a hand when I select a
highlighting tool.  It would be nice to have some feedback from the
cursor to show that it is ready to mark up some text.

I hope my feedback does not come across as negative or aggressive.
These are marginal improvements that I am suggesting based on my
experience using Okular for many hours per day over the past 18 months.
 Okular is great and I am by no mean criticising the work that you have
been doing.  I wish I had more time and skill to contribute to Okular.
I am thankful to you for this great tool and am at your disposal if I
can be of assitance.

Thank you for reading,
Yuv

[1] <https://blogs.kde.org/2010/01/08/goodbye-okular>

-- 
Yuval Levy, MBA, CFA, JD 2014 Candidate
Western University Faculty of Law

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