[Okular-devel] Adding an annotation selection mode

[Jon Mease]

Greetings,
     After some time away I'm ready to work a bit more on enhancing
Okular's annotation support.

     I am interested in working towards adding an "Annotation Selection
Tool" that would live under the "Tools" menu.  I would like this tool to
provide functionality that is similar to the "Shape handling" mode in
Calligra Words. Below I've sketched out the 6 main features that I would
like to see provided by this tool.

1) Selection: Left click on an annotation to select it. Hold control while
left clicking an annotation to add it to the current set of selected
annotations. Left click and drag to select all of the annotations in a
rectangular region.  A selection rectangle is drawn around the set of
selected annotations.

2) Delete selected annotations:  The current set of selected annotations
may be deleted by hitting the delete key or by right clicking and selecting
'Delete' from a context menu.

3) Move selected annotations: The current set of selected annotations may
be moved together by left click dragging the selection rectangle.

4) Resize selected annotations: The selection rectangle may be resized by
dragging resize handles. This scales all selected annotations accordingly.

5) Edit selected annotation properties:  It should be possible to edit
certain properties on all selected annotations (such as color).

6) Edit geometry of selected annotations:  Selected annotations may display
drag handles used to alter their geometry.  For example, these drag handles
could be used to alter the start and end points of a line or the vertices
of a polygon.

     Since this is a large undertaking (at least for me as a part-time
hobby project) I wanted to get some feedback from the community before
getting started.  Do you like the overall idea?  Any questions or concerns
at this 10,000 foot level?

     If the overall idea sounds good to everyone, I think I'll first work
on implementing items 1-3 above and submit that for review before looking
at 4, 5, and 6. Based on my experience last year implementing undo/redo
support for annotations, I'm pretty confident that 1-3 will be fairly
straightforward to implement and won't require a lot of refactoring of the
core annotation code in Okular.  Items 4, 5, and 6 on the other hand I do
expect to require a fair amount of refactoring.

Thoughts?

-Jon
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