Making Okular annotations searchable: what's needed to progress?

Brainstorm
1

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!

2

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.

3

Similar has been discussed here: https://discuss.kde.org/t/okular-24-12-2-annotation-edit-cant-have-properties-of-highlighted-text/30481/8

4

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.