[Scribus] a bit off-topic: Tool to add notes to PDFs??

[Philipp Wagner]

Craig Ringer schrieb:
> 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.

That's the bug:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151614

Looks like they got poppler to almost have write support. I just did a
quick hack of okular together with podofo, it worked more or less. But
the main problem is that poppler's code reading annotations is terribly
buggy (wrong positions of the annotations, content of the annotation is
not read etc., so that needs improvement in the first place.

Unfortunately, my free time is very limited at the moment, so I
currently cannot have a closer look at that.

Apart from that, I don't think it's the greatest idea to improve poppler
(a pdf _rendering_ library) to provide write support, but whatever :-)

Philipp