[Okular-devel] [okular] [Bug 328026] Having the option to paste selected text into an annotation.

[Chris George]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328026

--- Comment #8 from Chris George <technatica at gmail.com> ---
It was the first thing I noticed about the application. The "normal"
procedure in most textual applications, like web browsers, word-processors
and text editors is to be able to highlight text with the selection tool
and then use the standard Ctrl-C or r-click, copy. Normally when a user
releases the mouse button or the shift key when using the keyboard to
select text, the selected text just sits there waiting for the next step.

It is totally a niche use case, only applicable to maybe a couple million
students and researchers around the world, but being able to select text
and have it immediately injected into an annotation would be very handy.
Having the annotation easily accessible via the xml file, as it currently
is, is brilliant for my application. I am trying to put together something
that makes sense, the Docear path is too top heavy IMO. They have chosen to
build their workflow around a mindmap and have yet to do much work on the
authoring side of the equation, I am working with a programmer's outliner
and authoring tool. But I am not a programmer. I am a student. I am working
through a python course at the moment, but it will be a long time until I
am competent enough to write my own pdf parsing utility. I was overjoyed to
find okular and have been using it for a couple of years to highlight text,
copy it, paste it into a note annotation (then reformatting it to all be on
one line instead of several) and access it in the xml file via the outliner
when I am writing the paper that I did the research for. I have been
keeping my eyes open for opportunities to improve the situation and was
looking ahead to when Docear completes their pdf parser. They are mainly
there, but it has been a chore trying to find a reader that meets their
needs and they have had to write a pretty hefty interface to their app.
This will probably allow them to write a filter for okular to get the info
out they want, I was looking for a backdoor. I use linux, cross platform is
not my priority and I have no problem using the tools at hand to make this
work.

The outliner is cross platform and so is okular. I am polishing the
workflow and trying to make it as smooth and seamless as possible. This is
a minor niggle and it probably isn't worth your time. Someday I will find a
way capture annotations, highlighted text and bookmarks right from the pdf.
Until then I am just happy to have access to the xml file in the docdata
directory in order to get the contents of the notes back out of the pdf. I
pretty much don't use the highlighter, as the positional information in the
xml file does me no good (but the text would) or the bookmarks, as I have
no way of jumping to one on opening the pdf via command line.

I'll just keep making do for now. Thanks for taking the time.

Chris



On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328026
>
> --- Comment #7 from Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> ---
> How is our method of copying text unusual?
>
> --
> You are receiving this mail because:
> You reported the bug.
>

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.