My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
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My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
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Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#2I just evaluated Evince, Okular, Foxit, and Acrobat for annotating PDFs.
My particular use case is to annotate emails, spreadsheet, etc., and merge them as exhibits into a legal brief.
After annotation, the other programs can export the original or it export the annotation layers but it could not give you a PDF with both the original and the annotations merged into one layer. This was a deal breaker.
With Okular you can print the PDF with the annotations as a new PDF to make sure your annotations are always visible. With the other programs the annotations are on separate layers which can get hidden on purpose or by mistake.
I found no other free program that could flatten the layers.
Okular deserves to be better known.
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#3I just evaluated Evince, Okular, Foxit, and Acrobat for annotating PDFs. My particular use case is to annotate emails, spreadsheet, etc., and merge them as exhibits into a legal brief. After annotation, the other programs can export the original or it export the annotation layers but it could not give you a PDF with both the original and the annotations merged into one layer. This was a deal breaker. With Okular you…
Have you found any software for exporting annotations (especially highlighted text)? Ideally, I would want to highlight text, select graphics, and have the software let me export those to PDF or doc/odf. My use case is reviewing academic papers.
I looked into Xodo and Foxit, but they don't offer what I need.
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#4I just evaluated Evince, Okular, Foxit, and Acrobat for annotating PDFs. My particular use case is to annotate emails, spreadsheet, etc., and merge them as exhibits into a legal brief. After annotation, the other programs can export the original or it export the annotation layers but it could not give you a PDF with both the original and the annotations merged into one layer. This was a deal breaker. With Okular you…
In theory, shouldn't every PDF viewer support printing... and both macOS and Windows 10 support printing to PDF... which flattens the layers?
Just tried it with macOS Preview and totally flattens it, the annotations pane lists nothing, I can't select/move annotations... they're permanent.
However, also just tried with Acrobat Reader on macOS, and infuriatingly after selecting the system's "Print to PDF" Acrobat pops up an error saying it doesn't support print to PDF. WTF. Why would they intentionally go out of their way to disable that?
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#5I really enjoy Okular, it's fast, looks good and has smooth-scrolling (looking at you Foxit). However, I have been forced to use Foxit when dealing with annotations, because a lot of times Okular simply cannot display them if they were created in other programs.
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#6I used to use Okular before.
Even now when ever I try to use it, it is slow, and e eating up a lot of ram, scrolling doesn't look smooth enough. Whenever loading a new page, load time is clearly visible it used to work fine back in 2017.
My main desktop environment is KDE Plasma but I use evince for now while reading.
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#7Okular is actually the reason I created Polar:
Well, one of the reasons.
First, if you like Okular, you're stuck if you want to run on any other platform. It doesn't work on mobile, it doesn't work on the web, doesn't work on Linux, MacOS or Windows [1]
Additionally, there were pretty severe bugs when I used it and there were 1-2 long outstanding bugs regarding annotations that weren't fixed for nearly a decade.
The main issue with PDF annotations also applies. If you use PDF annotations it means mutating the PDF which has all sorts of problems.
I've had issues where you're working on Okular or Preview or Acrobat and then try to use another app and your annotations simply don't work or the PDF is corrupted in some weird way.
Having an immutable PDF solves that problem which is the avenue I went with in Polar.
Polar supports Web + Linux + Windows + MacOS. It also supports annotation without mutating the PDF and it's VERY hackable since it's just based on Typescript - which is one of the features I wanted.
We're very close from having mobile too and just need to clean up some CSS.
Anyway.. would LOVE your feedback if you play with Polar and find it doesn't perfectly nail your use case.
I'm actively developing it now and I'm pushing 1-2 releases per week.
1. My understanding is that while it DOES work on these platforms - it doesn't work WELL on them. Last time I checked there was no download for Windows or MacOS and you had to install the full KDE for these platforms.
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#8My favorite tool for extracting data from PDFs: Tabula https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#9I just evaluated Evince, Okular, Foxit, and Acrobat for annotating PDFs. My particular use case is to annotate emails, spreadsheet, etc., and merge them as exhibits into a legal brief. After annotation, the other programs can export the original or it export the annotation layers but it could not give you a PDF with both the original and the annotations merged into one layer. This was a deal breaker. With Okular you…
In theory, shouldn't every PDF viewer support printing... and both macOS and Windows 10 support printing to PDF... which flattens the layers? Just tried it with macOS Preview and totally flattens it, the annotations pane lists nothing, I can't select/move annotations... they're permanent. However, also just tried with Acrobat Reader on macOS, and infuriatingly after selecting the system's "Print to PDF" Acrobat pops…
Because they sell PDF creation tools: https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat.html?promoid=C12Y324...
Re: My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
#10When I'm on windows I'm always puzzled about how Adobe Reader is slow and has tons of features I will never going to use. Just let me get to duplex printing dialog, adobe!!!
I mostly use Okular for navigation and printing, but it also has a great feature of letting you select area of the document and either copy selected text or image into a buffer. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it makes working with pdf documents really comfortable.