Philipp Wagner wrote: > They added annotation support (btw, okular, the new kpdf, is really > fast!), but these annotations are not PDF annotations, but saved to a > separate XML file (.kde4/share/apps/okular/docdata). > > Ah, thanks for clearing that up. None of the reports about the kpdf changes bothered to mention that it used a non-standard and incompatible annotation method. Pity.
I can understand it, since the xpdf/poppler PDF rendering libraries unfortunately provide little or no facility for modifying and writing PDF so it's relatively difficult for a library that uses (eg) libpoppler to insert annotations and write the PDF out. At least, it was last time I looked. In fact, I'd been wondering how the Kpdf folks had built their annotation support. > Well, there seems to be no solution (which was the result of my previous > search, too), perhaps I'll find some time to look into okular and podofo > and get them to work together ... Should not be impossible at least. I wouldn't jump into that quite yet. It looks like both the evince and kpdf folks have been working on enhancing poppler to support PDF annotations. This XML file stuff may just be an interim step, maybe intended as a temp file if they're going to use another tool/library to insert the annotations. If you're interested in the problem, you'd probably want to start by prodding the kpdf and evince folks to find out what the situation is and how you can help. -- Craig Ringer
