[Okular-devel] [okular] [Bug 326027] New: Okular Handbook misleading on form fill-out

[skierpage]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326027

            Bug ID: 326027
           Summary: Okular Handbook misleading on form fill-out
    Classification: Unclassified
           Product: okular
           Version: 0.16.5
          Platform: Kubuntu Packages
                OS: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
          Assignee: okular-devel at kde.org
          Reporter: skierpage at gmail.com

Okular stores PDF form fill-out information separately from the PDF file, in
.kde/share/apps/okular/docdata/ as NNNNN.<filename>.pdf.xml. If users aren't
told this, they're prone to data loss. My situation was I viewed a PDF in
Firefox, chose [Open With a Different Viewer] because pdf.js doesn't support
forms yet, I filled it in in Okular, but then I moved it out of  my downloads
folder and renamed the pdf. So I lost my form fill-out information until I
learned about how Okular stores form data. The Okular Advanced Features > Forms
 page in the handbook needs to have more information about this, it's very
bare-bones.

Okular handbook > The File Menu says 
 File → Save As... 
Save the currently open file under a different name using the document backend.
With the PDF backend (Poppler >= 0.8 required) it is possible to save the
document with the changed values of the form fields. 

This is misleading. 1) You don't have to do anything for form fill-in
information to be saved. When you close the Okular window Okular saves the form
information to that docdata directory. 2) For some PDF documents File > Save
As... is disabled, e.g http://www.ppt.gc.ca/form/pdfs/pptc054.pdf , yet the
form info is saved fine. 3) Saying "Poppler >=0.8" is far too technical, Help >
About Backend only tells me "PDF Backend Version 0.6.3" but has no indication
what Poppler is or what version of that I'm using.

Since File > Save As... was disabled, I tried File > Export As > Document
Archive. The Okular help handbook says "allows you to save the document with
your annotations into an Okular-specific archive format", but looking at the
contents of the archive, it *does not* contain PDF form fill-in information. 
This also seems worth mentioning in the handbook (and it seems like a bug in
Okular?).

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
Okular's PDF form-fill is a great feature, but the way it works should be
better documented. People are obviously concerned that their form data won't
get lost.

Okular Handbook Revision 0.15.70 (KDE 4.10) (2012-09-09) on Kubuntu 13.04.

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