First of all, I want to say that this happens with Okular 0.20.2 and Poppler 0.24. The annotations are saved directly in the pdf file. I've tried a few pdf viewers and I can say that this happens with most of them. For example "Master PDF Editor" (which should be a quite advanced pdf viewer/editor) and Firefox's built-in pdf plugin. It doesn't happen with Foxit Reader (through Wine). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open a pdf in Okular. 2. Make some annotations, for example pencil, geometric shapes, text highlighter and so on. 3. Save and exit. 4. Open the edited pdf with another pdf viewer (or with Firefox's built-in pdf plugin). Actual Results: None of the annotations made by Okular is displayed. Expected Results: Other pdf viewers should correctly display annotations made by Okular. The OS is Linux Mint 17.1 (based on Ubuntu 14.04), KDE 4.14.2
The problem is confirmed on the latest Kubuntu daily development iso, featuring Okular 0.23.1 Also, I want to add that on Windows Sumatrapdf (version 2.5.2) also doesn't work well with Okular's annotations. It can only read some of them, for example the ellittic shape, but not others, such as the pencil.
This is a duplicate of the multiple bugs around the issue, you can save the annotations saving the file.
Created attachment 94860 [details] Pdf annotations test
Hi Albert, please note that I'm saving the annotations directly into the pdf file using "File" > "Save as" > "Save" > "Overwrite". All the bugs that I've read about talk about a different thing, i.e. annotations NOT saved directly in the pdf file. I guess you are thinking to these (old and already fixed) bugs. My situation is very different: again, I save annotations into the pdf file but SOME (not all) pdf readers don't see them. To make this clear, I just made a test file for you. Try to open it with Okular and then with Firefox's built-in pdf viewer. You'll see the difference.
But they do show in both Okular and Adobe Reader, so it'd seem to me is a bug in firefox's built-in pdf viewer if they don't show up there.
It's not only Firefox's plugin. It's also sumatraPDF (for Windows), "Master PDF Editor" for Linux, others that I tried (always on Linux), Android pdf viewer. Firefox's plugin is quite basic and maybe buggy, but the others are supposed to work well. And they indeed show annotations of each other: only Okular's annotations have this problem. Okular probably makes something different from others with annotations. While this is not a major bug, I think that this should remain open. Even just for reference.
Yes, unlike other annotators, Okular (Poppler) does not attach any appearance stream to annotations. Appearance streams are optional according to PDF specs, and PDF readers should in theory be able to render annotations without them. As you said, Firefox's plugin is basic and probably does not have proper annotation support.
Ciao Fabio, thanks for your insight. I don't know how much work it would take, but could you please consider adding appearance streams to Poppler's annotations? It seems the problem is more widespread than just Firefox.
Don't play with bug status, much less to set it to a wrong value