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

[Craig Ringer]

Philipp Wagner wrote:

>  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.
>
>   
I can't say I'm too surprised. Most of the work I've done on podofo has 
been fixups and cleanups, and there's plenty more to do. I find the 
annotation code particularly unclear.

A test case or two illustrating the problem wouldn't hurt, though.
> 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 :-)
>   
It's not as bad as it sounds. PDF is designed to be appendable, so you 
can potentially get away with appending annotations without disturbing 
the main document, something that would probably permit a simpler 
approach to writing the appended PDF data. This also, handily, preserves 
digital signatures. The downside is that people will want to be able to 
change more and more, and poppler really isn't designed to be usable as 
a PDF editing library.

--
Craig Ringer