After upgrading to OpenSUSE 15.0 I was greeted today with this confusing message: "This document contains annotations or form data that were saved internally by a previous Okular version. Internal storage is no longer supported. Please save to a file in order to move them if you want to continue to edit the document." I could make no sense whatsoever of this message. Only after searching and finding bug 394917, I understood that actually this message means the exact opposite: that annotations used to be stored externally in the .local/share/okular/docdata folder but now will be embedded in the PDF document. I must say, it was very disturbing to learn that one of the best features of Okular (storing annotations externally) was removed. I have nearly 2000 PDF documents with annotations dating back to 2012. These PDFs are scientific articles collected over time as part of my research activities. In my case these annotations are only for my own use, these is no reason to store them inside the document. This has always worked very well and I was relying heavily on this feature. Indeed it is very awkward for me to store annotations directly in the PDF. For example in the case where I need to share one of such articles with one of my students I do not wish to pass my annotations along. Now I will have to delete the annotations one by one and save it into a different file. It is also problematic in case where these files sit on folders that are shared with different people, not to mention all the potential conflicts of different people annotating and saving into the same file. I believe that both features (saving externally and embedding in the PDF file) have their uses. For a productivity tool it would make a lot sense to support them both. For this reason I would like to ask you to please restore this feature.
Not going to happen.
(In reply to Albert Astals Cid from comment #1) > Not going to happen. Would you mind to explain why?
There's various blogs, mailing lists discussions and bugs about it, so yes, i do mind explaining my time explaining it again.
explaining my time -> spending my time
This dates back to... long ago? There are basically these commits (and probably others) which introduced this message (KMessageWidget *Okular::Part::m_migrationMessage): commit 34f40b2c6f301a8eab1ea244aab5d281a0384a9b Author: Albert Astals Cid <albert.astals.cid@kdab.com> Date: Mon Nov 13 15:35:06 2017 +0100 Tweak migrationMessage text a bit commit 8a1acdcd6a0ce93c062f549c5f02dc38694cc9f2 Author: Fabio D'Urso <fabiodurso@hotmail.it> Date: Wed Sep 10 12:01:58 2014 +0200 Non-blocking docdata/ migration message commit e059d2652caf965f2ca20f5da666d64db4672a80 Author: Fabio D'Urso <fabiodurso@hotmail.it> Date: Tue Sep 9 16:08:32 2014 +0200 core: support for migration of annots and forms out of docdata/ But apparently, this support already has existed before?: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/okular-devel/2013-March/014510.html > > Another functionality that would be helpful to me and I have not found a > > way to get around: I now have hundreds of marked up PDFs. The > > annotations are all in $(kde4-config > > --localprefix)/share/apps/okular/docdata/ and I would like to export all > > of my library of marked up PDFs into PDFs with embedded annotations. > > Any idea how I could do this? > > There's no automated way to do this. You have to open and "Save As" each file > separately. > [...] > Fabio I think you should be glad that you upgraded, with a reinstallation you would have lost all the annotations. Considering such cases, it is probably fine to save the annotations inside the PDF file. See also: Bug 151614 Exporting annotations to an XML file could be useful, but apparently Okular does not do that. Bug 151614 has a "quick and dirty" program to do the opposite, which could help you to migrate your annotations. What remains, is to invert the message, so it fits its meaning.