I’ve recently discovered Okular and I’m loving it as a robust PDF viewer.
I see an enormous amount of potential in the Annotations Pane. When opening documents that have already been reviewed, often you want to see all annotations together and search them. However, the current pane only shows that there’s highlights, notes, etc. on a given page or by a given author.
Therefore, I am suggesting a tweak to the Annotations Pane that includes the contents of textual annotations as in the example below:
Example:
Before
Page 4
Highlight
Highlight with Comment
Popup Note
Page 5
Strike out
Inline note
After
Page 4
Highlight
We see a role for open source software in key business applications
Highlight with Comment
Highlight: However, ongoing challenges remain to bolster acceptance.
Comment: What can be done to improve acceptance in workplaces?
Popup Note
Do the questions on this page have any answers in research?
Page 5
Strike out
There is little use attempting to usurp widespread commercial options
Inline note
Not with that attitude!
The best part of this improvement is that once the annotation content is made available, the powerful search tool at the top of the pane can be used to filter out users, annotation type, content in annotations, and the pages.
If anyone has any suggestions to get this feature implemented, I would be very grateful!
I’m very happy to see this post, but rather sad that its basically the only one out there requesting this and that nobody has responded in so long!
I’m coming from zotero and was super happy with all the keyboard commands available in okular and the general zippiness of it all. But have hit an absolute wall when it comes to these annotations.
I like what you have in your idea for how the annotation pane could look, I would add to this to look at what zotero has on their pdf reader. Things like seeing the color of the annotation and then being able to filter by colors is a huge productivity boost when reviewing documents.
maybe I should make my own thread, because its technically distinct from what this thread is asking for and from the thread you linked is asking for (editable annotations?). I want the panel to show more info about the annotations at first glance, and to allow filtering by color.
Consider I’m running on a Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB RAM (Raspberry Pi kernel with Plasma Mobile Desktop), and I can confirm Okular is very good at handling huge PDF sizes (2000+ pages), while Zotero makes my whole system freeze if I try to do so!)
Nevertheless, Zotero still has the upper hand when it comes to database annotation, but I’m sure with a few tweaks this can change: there are already CLI programs that can search through pdf annotations to start with, which could be a good workaround for now.
Agree that there is great potential to make the annotations pane more useful. I would love to see an option that shows all comments in full so that they can be viewed in the pane side by side with the document. Currently you have to open the pop-up note to see them. Furthermore, there should be a little tooltip on highlighted text to show that a comment has been made. There is currently no visual marker that distinguishes a highlight with a comment from a highlight without a comment.