[Okular-devel] Engaging

Sat Mar 30 13:39:03 UTC 2013

On Friday, March 29, 2013 02:15:54 PM Yuval Levy wrote:
> Dear Okular developers.
> [snip]

Hi Yuval, I'm glad you liked the new annotation features :)

> 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".

I don't see inconsistency between "Save as" and "Save copy as" as 
functionalities, but it could be because I "just know" what they do :)
OTOH, "Save copy as" can probably be worded better, something like, dunno, 
"Save original document as". This needs to be discussed

> 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

I quite like the idea of merging Export and Save as. As I said, I'm not fully 
convinced about "Save copy as" too.

I see the "Annotations only (XML)" option a little hard to do: what would you 
do if the user chooses this option on a already annotated PDF file? Would you 
only save modified annotations to XML? What about deleted ones?
Currently we refuse to use the XML format on already annotated PDF documents 
(that's why you get the "annotation chnages will not be saved automatically" 
warning in such documents).

Apart from these two issues I generally like the idea. What do other devs 
think about it? Yuval, are you willing to work on it?

> 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.

A regular "Save" option has already been requested in bug 301774, so this 
should probably be discussed there.

A quick note about your SSD consideration: annotations are not the only things 
we write to docdata/, we also write the viewport history (aka "restore last 
seen page when you reopen a document") and filled form values.

> 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?

There's no automated way to do this. You have to open and "Save As" each file 
separately.

> 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.

This is bug 159601. I've started some work on it, check out the "configurable-
review-tools" git branch. I've got a few more patches on my laptop waiting to 
be polished and pushed :)
You can find some (old) screenshots here:
 - http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/okular-devel/2012-July/012047.html (look for
   the attachments at the end)
 - http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/okular-devel/2012-August/012054.html

> 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,

Thank you for caring about us and Okular,
Please let us know if you are willing to work on these issues, we always need 
manpower :)

Fabio