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politza / pdf-tools

Emacs support library for PDF files.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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annotations of highlighted text are not visible in other pdf viewers #399

Closed dzklaim closed 6 years ago

dzklaim commented 6 years ago

it is not possible to view an annotation in evince for example created using the highlight text + annotation functionality. I can see the the highlighted text, the indication that there is an annotation on the sidepane but it seems that evince fails to recognize that there is some text associated with the highlighted text.

vspinu commented 6 years ago

On tablet I have tried many readers and only ezPDF seem to recognize annotations.

On desktop linux Okular has no problems recognizing annotations.

hyiltiz commented 6 years ago

But none of the following can read the annotations wrote to pdf in pdf-tools:

politza commented 6 years ago

I think the problem was that I set the Rect entry of the annotation to the empty rectangle, but the specification says to ignore all markup outside this rectangle. With commit 30be1f75cc47a719ba88e4a2c2af2df4f05ba934 I changed it to the smallest rectangle containing all markup. I verified that it works in Acrobat and Evince, please check it out.

hyiltiz commented 6 years ago

Oh, wow, that would be wonderful! Is this backward compatible, i.e. I could still open PDFs with markups from previous pdf-tools, and can then save those as PDFs with markups supported by other platforms?

politza commented 6 years ago

No, those would be in need of fixing. The following function should accomplish this, be careful.

(defun pdf-annot-fix-broken-edges (&optional file-or-buffer verbosep)
  (interactive (list (current-buffer) t))
  (let ((nfixed 0))
    (dolist (a (pdf-info-getannots nil file-or-buffer))
      (let-alist a
        (when (and (memq .type '(squiggly underline strike-out highlight))
                   (equal .edges '(0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0)))
          (pdf-info-mvannot
           .id  
           (apply #'pdf-util-edges-union
                  (apply #'append
                         (mapcar
                          (lambda (e)
                            (pdf-info-getselection .page e nil file-or-buffer))
                          .markup-edges)))
           file-or-buffer)
          (cl-incf nfixed))))
    (when verbosep
      (message "Fixed %d annotations" nfixed))
    nfixed))
hyiltiz commented 6 years ago

Just compiled https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/commit/30be1f75cc47a719ba88e4a2c2af2df4f05ba934, uninstalled pdf-tools from list-packages then installed the compiled .tar archive. pdf-tools seems to be working, but neither the old highlighted annotations with text nor a newly created one got picked up by other readers.

Just saw the function you mentioned above. Running it inside M-: while the pdf was open in pdf-tools with a highlighted annotation did not help (highlight still haven't got picked up by other readers).

politza commented 6 years ago

I just pushed another update.

You would also have to reload the library or restart Emacs.

Use M-x in the Pdf's buffer.

hyiltiz commented 6 years ago

Great, that fixed it! I had to run the above function on the old pdf (some comments were lost when I used https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/commit/30be1f75cc47a719ba88e4a2c2af2df4f05ba934 but I guess I'll have to live with that since I had no backups) before it shows up in other viewers. This is a major usability upgrade 👏 👏

politza commented 6 years ago

What do you mean by "lost contents", how ?

hyiltiz commented 6 years ago

I had multiple annotation content/text corresponding to highlights in a few PDFs. Only very old ones, or ones that are at the beginning (roughly 10%) of the document are still there after loading the PDFs with the newly compiled pdf-tools, while newer annotations (at around 60-100% of the PDFs) were completely lost. In other terms, it was as if my annotations made last night was not there while the ones I made during last week was there. It may or may not be a pdf-tools issue, as I did killall emacs yesterday night, which might produce the same result, if the annotations weren't written to PDFs upon C-c C-c.

politza commented 6 years ago

The new code affects new annotations only, so I guess it was due to killing Emacs without saving.

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

Dear Politza I get exactly the same issue with latest version of pdf-tools under OSX: annotations do not appear when I open the file with Aperçu or Acrobat. Do you know how I could fix that (if there is a way)? I find your package awesome, and this is the only feature that prevent me to use it instead classical pdf viewers.

politza commented 5 years ago

Please install the latest version of this package, force a rebuild by removing the epdfinfo executable and then see if the issue persists.

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

I just tried that, and get the same result: in acrobat (or Apercu), i only can see an empty white box instead of the comment. But i don't want to take too much of your time. best.

politza commented 5 years ago

 Can you upload an example PDF somewhere ?

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

https://we.tl/t-bGlfkXmPaE

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

duque2016.pdf There is an annotation p2, top of second paragraph.

politza commented 5 years ago

That does not look like the annotation on page 2 was created with pdf-tools. I've added an annotation are you able to see that one in the other viewers. duque2016-2.pdf

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

Well... yes It was, actually... Do you want me to do it again?

thibault-gajdos commented 5 years ago

The problem maybe come from the fact that i tried to open the annotation from another pdf reader. Here is a new document, with an annotation made in pdf-tools, not opened in any other reader Angelini2015.PDF (p.1).

samspo commented 5 years ago

It still doesn't work when I try to read annotated documents on preview (mac os). I tried with some documents I annotated and with duque2016-2.pdf

I obtain white square with no annotation:

image

It works on acrobat