Last year I wrote about some enhancements made to Okular’s annotation tool and in one of those, Simone Gaiarin commented that he was working on redesigning the Annotation toolbar altogether. I was quite interested and was also thinking of ‘modernizing’ the tool — only, I had no idea how much work it would be.
The existing annotation tool works, but it had some quirks and had many advanced options which were documented pretty well in the Handbook but not obvious to an unscrupulous user. For instance, if the user would like to highlight some part of the text, she selects (single-clicks) the highlighter tool, applies it to a block of text. When another part of text is to be highlighted, you’d expect the highlighter tool to apply directly; but it didn’t ‘stick’ — tool was unselected after highlighting the first block of text. There is an easy way to make the annotation tool ‘stick’ — instead of single-click to select the tool, simply double-click, and it persists. Another instance is the ‘Strikeout’ annotation which is not displayed by default, but can be added to the tools list.
Simone, with lots of inputs, testing and reviews from David Hurka, Nate Graham and Albert Astals Cid et al., has pulled off a magnificent rewrite of Okular’s annotation toolbar. To get an idea of the amount of work went into this, see this phabricator task and this invent code review. The result of many months of hardwork is a truly modern, easy to explore-and-use annotation support. I am not aware of any other libre PDF reader with such good annotation features.
Starting from the left, default tools are: Highlight (brush icon), Underline (straight line) and Squiggle (wobbly line), Strike out, Insert text (Typewriter), Inline note, Popup note, Freehand drawing and Shapes (arrows, lines, rectangles etc.). The line thickness, colour, opacity and font of the tools can be customized easily from the drawer. Oh, and the selected annotation tool ‘sticks’ by default (see the ‘pin’ icon at the right end of toolbar).
When upgrading to okular-20.08 from a previous version, it will preserve the customized annotation tools created by the user and make those available under ‘Quick annotations’, and these can be quickly applied using Alt+n
(Alt-1
, Alt-2
etc.) short cuts. It did reset my custom shortcuts keys for navigation (I use Vim keys gg
to go to the first page and G
to go to the last page), which can be manually added back.
Here is the new toolbar in action.